Ever since I met the Songza guys at New York Tech Meetup, I’ve wanted to learn more about the app. It’s the first music service that I’ve been excited to use, mostly because it removes the work entirely. I’ve been curious about a few things, like how Songza plans to combat the big boys, namely Pandora, and how exactly these guys are making any money. Remember, Songza has no audio ads, no limits, and is free to download.
Co-founders Elias Roman and Eric Davich sat down with me to discuss this and more, saying that the only way to enter into a space as crowded as streaming music is to bring something totally different to the table. → Read More
Sure, there are plenty of music streaming services out there, and even ones with amazing shareable playlists, but Songza differentiates by falling right into that sweet spot between Spotify and Pandora. The app’s most interesting feature, Concierge, sets up playlists based on day and time, with filters for whatever mood you might be in.
For example, on Wednesday morning, Concierge says that I’m most likely to want to listen to something for Work Or Study, Still Waking Up, or Working Out. If I change the settings to give me music for late Friday Night, options change to Getting High, Getting Lucky, Nightcap, A Sweaty Dance Party, or Bedtime. → Read More
Mike first covered Amie Street back in 2006. At the time, he was a big fan. Back then, the startup was targeting a new music model, which allowed musicians to upload their songs to Amie Street’s platform, offering those tracks to listeners for free. The more downloads the songs attracted, the price would slowly increase — the price then indicating the song’s popularity. In what now looks like a savvy decision, Amie Street sold to Amazon last September for an undisclosed amount, deciding to focus its efforts on Songza: The social Internet radio service it acquired in 2008.
Today, after much iterating and tinkering, Songza is launching free mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow users to create and share personalized music collections — in the comfort of the cloud. Songza Co-founder and CEO Elias Roman likens the service to a “music concierge”, in that it serves users with playlists created by experts (and friends) for whatever mood or musical experience you could possible want. “The future of music will be driven by the convergence of expert and social curation”, the co-founder said. → Read More
Amie Street is one of those startups that just got me – love at first site if you will. I first discovered them in 2006, calling it an awesome new music model. Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1. The price of the song is an indication of how good it is, as friends share the good stuff with others.
Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company raised venture capital from Amazon and others. And today, the company will announce that Amazon has acquired the Amie Street business. Going forward the team will focus on Songza, which they acquired in 2009.
Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don’t know for sure). → Read More
Last month, I published Part 1 of my Guide To Music On The Web, which covered music recommendation sites, Web radio, independent music sites, playlists, and music visualizations. Today, in Part II we’ll take a tour of music search engines, Web players, ways to share music on Twitter, and music mixing apps.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your comments and insights on my previous post and of course, took them under consideration while creating this second part. Please bear in mind that I can’t list ALL the music applications out there. I really tried to find the best and the most used applications that will probably still be here to serve you tomorrow too.
So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins. → Read More
For months, popular music store Amie Street has kept a deal it forged with Songza, a media streaming service, under wraps. But this tweet (and a fair amount of research on our part) has uncovered the news: Amie Street acquired Songza back in October 2008, and planned to keep the deal under wraps until they were ready to announce whatever it is they have in store for the product.
Amie Street co-founders Elias Roman and Joshua Boltuch confirm that the acquisition definitely took place, and Songza co-founder Scott Robbin has since become part of the 20-headed team based in New York. Songza’s other co-founder, Aza Raskin, had earlier left to join Mozilla.
Update: more information about the deal just came in. Songza was acquired for part stock, part cash, and the total sum was in the high six figures to low seven figures.
It’s not exactly the best of times to be in the digital music space right now, particularly if you’re a startup trying to build a legitimate business around an ad-supported music streaming service (look at what happened to Ruckus and SpiralFrog), but that’s exactly where Amie Street is planning on taking Songza. → Read More
SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result. → Read More
Last.fm has a new look today that simplifies the navigation of the main site and makes finding music easier. Or at least, it would make finding music easier if the site wasn’t so buggy. (At least for me. I couldn’t even log in without getting an error. This may be due to fans rushing to check out the new features, or simply poor planning). The new features a library of songs that you can now add to with a single click, instant recommendations based on the song you are listening to, and charts showing the popularity of each recommended song. The site is now organized by music, videos, charts, and events. And for each song, there is increasingly the ability to play the entire song. At the top of the page is a search bar, where you can enter a song or artist and hit play. That’s very Songza of them. CrunchBase Information Last.fm Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines in the future. Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal). Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well. Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding. CrunchBase Information songza Seeqpod Skreemr Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them. Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web. The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads. Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen. Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod. CrunchBase Information Seeqpod Skreemr songza Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Music search engines are just one of the many ways to get free music on the Internet (BitTorrent and MP3Sparks, formerly AllofMP3, are other popular ways). But for some users they are a near perfect way to listen to music on demand, and/or round out their music collection. Three that we’ve been tracking are SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr. All three index the web, or parts of the web, looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. Users search by artist or song. MP3s or other non-DRM sound files with metadata matching the query are served as results. Unlike sites like LaLa, Imeem and Pandora (and many others), which are all trying to play by various RIAA rules to deliver music to users, music search engines generally don’t pay royalties of any kind. The music itself is never on their servers, so they have significantly less copyright exposure. More on that below. Of the three, Seeqpod is the most useful. It has an index of 8 million individual songs, auto-spell checks queries to find common misspellings, and allows users to create playlists. Seeqpod also has embeddable players, and will try to find music videos of songs you are playing. Seeqpod, by the way, was originally a project of the Lawrence Berkely National Lab. http://www.seeqpod.net/cache/seeqpodEmbed.swfSeeqPod – Playable Search Songza also allows users to create playlists and provide embeddable players.Skreemr has bare bones functionality and the hit rate is a little iffy. But they have one feature that the others do not – a direct link to the file on the third party server. That means downloading the song to your hard drive is just a right mouse click away.A fourth company, Deezer, changed its model in the face of litigation in France. Copyright, Schmopyright There’s no reason to mince words here – the music these sites are playing is almost always copyright infringing. But it’s distributed on servers unaffiliated with the search engine itself, making it effectively impossible for the RIAA and its international equivalents to do much about it other than try to force the largest infringers to remove the content. That’s because there is little recourse against the search engines themselves. None of those legalities affect the search engines, though. It’s unlikely that under current U.S. law the RIAA can do anything at all to stop them. Current case law gives a lot of leeway to search engines. → Read More
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