Google has purchased music streaming vendor Songza for an undisclosed price as Google continues to look for ways to increase the competition with Apple and others for the music dollars of online users.
The acquisition of Songza was announced July 1 in a post on the Google Play Google+ page. “Exciting news today—we’re thrilled to welcome Songza to Google,” the post states. “They’ve built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users.”
Google does plan to “explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music” over the coming months, the post explained. “We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products.”
Songza apps are available for free for Android and for iOS.
The idea for Songza is to create playlists that match the many moods of its users. Users can let Songza’s “Music Concierge” find the right music for their needs or they can browse a curated playlist library organized by activity, genre, decade and mood. Users can also stream thousands of original playlists that are made by music experts.
In a post on its Website, Songza also announced the acquisition and its excitement at being brought in to Google. “We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do,” the statement said. “No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.”
In response to an eWEEK email seeking comment on the acquisition, a Google spokesperson said that the company would only confirm the deal but not offer any details on the price or other terms.
Google already has a host of music services within its operations from its Google Play store where consumers can buy music downloads to its All Access music subscription service, which was unveiled at Google I/O in May 2013 and allows users to stream as much music as they want to access, for a monthly fee.
The Google Play store was created in March 2012 to combine what until then were separate sites where Android lovers could buy their favorite apps, music and ebooks. Before Google Play, users had to shop through the individual Android Market, Google Music and the Google e-Bookstore sites.
The Songza acquisition continues a recent buying spree for Google that includes a growing list of companies. In June, the tech giant acquired imaging vendor Skybox Imaging for $500 million to aid Google’s mapping efforts. In May, Google bought mobile-device management vendor Divide for an undisclosed price. That deal was aimed at helping the company bolster and increase enterprise use of its Android-powered mobile devices in workplaces by offering increased security and compliance controls for businesses.
Also in May, Google announced the purchase of Stackdriver, a Boston-based company that was started in 2012 to provide cloud-application monitoring and data visualization services to users. On the same day, Google acquired Appetas, which helps restaurants build, maintain, promote and grow specialized Websites that serve the needs of the food industry. Google is shuttering Appetas as part of the purchase.
On May 6, Google acquired Adometry, a marketing and advertising optimization company that uses software-as-a-service–based advanced analytics to process and analyze tens of billions of impressions and advertising transactions per month to identify what consumers are buying.
In April, Google announced that it was getting into the high-altitude drone business with its purchase of Titan Aerospace in a move that is closely linked to Google’s Project Loon efforts, which use high-altitude balloons to build a high-speed Internet network. High-altitude Internet networks have been on Google’s radar since the company launched its Project Loon experiments in 2013, according to eWEEK reports. Project Loon uses a series of high-altitude balloons to build a high-speed Internet network that could be used to bring affordable Internet service to far-flung locations around the world for the first time.