Songza: Personalized Music Streaming

Songza offers free music streaming for residents in North America. It also offers recommendation services. According to Songza, its playlists were made by experts, and are based on mood, activity or time of day. Other categories include genre, themes, artists, era, and interests. Songza adapts to the personal music preference of the user, based on these categories.

Songza was acquired by Annie Street in October 2008. However, in August 2010 Annie Street was acquired by Amazon. Thereafter, Songza was re-launched in alpha version as a new company, retaining only the name from the original company.

Following the purchase, the new owners experimented and tried a number of iterations. Inspired by Turntable.fm, Songza featured Social Radio, a function where the user can act like a DJ. Social Radio makes Songza social and allows crowdsourcing. However, crowdsourcing was of low quality and the service was not differentiated from other companies of the same service, Songza was launched in beta on Android and iPhone.

The situation-based feature called Music Concierge was launched on iPhone and the web in March 2012. Examples of filters include, waking up, working out and singing in the shower.