This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Top Stories
Google reportedly bidding for Songza
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 9 June 2014
While Google is busy trying to steamroll its YouTube music service into business, word has it bosses at the web giant are also in talks to buy US-based Pandora-style streaming set up Songza.
Perhaps someone told CEO Larry Page that Songza is licensed through the SoundExchange collective licensing system, so he wouldn’t have to face the angry indie label lobby, with their irritatingly reasonable demands, once running that particular streaming music enterprise.
Although only officially live in the US (a SoundExchange-style blanket licence isn’t assured outside the States), curation-heavy Songza reportedly boasts 5.5 million active users. Which is someway behind Spotify and it’s more direct competitor Pandora, and probably even behind its most direct rival 8tracks, though it is nevertheless a sizable player in the American digital music market, and especially popular with younger music fans.
One source has told the New York Post that Google has so far offered $15 million for Songza, though another insider reckons that the offer was considerably higher than that, and the web giant isn’t alone in showing an interest in the streaming music start-up so could find itself in a bidding war. Not least with Amazon, an early backer of Songza which is now close to launching a limited streaming music service itself via its Prime venture.
Of course, with Google seemingly willing to go into full battle with the indie labels to get a YouTube streaming music service off the ground, and now these rumours of it bidding for Songza, one has to wonder what this says about Google Play Music That Can Be Accessed On A Stream All The Way Don’t You Know, or whatever nonsense name the firm used for its own proprietary streaming platform. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement.
Or perhaps, as with Apple and its purchase of Beats, the big prestige brands of the web ten years ago are conceding that they no longer appeal to the cool kids, and need to buy in cooler brands to engage young consumers. Though it’s interesting that Beats will enable Apple to complement its ‘interactive radio’ service iTunes Radio with a full-on streaming platform, while Songza coming into the Google fold would do the opposite.
