Songza is Joining Google
daily.songza.com
daily.songza.com
We're a tiny startup trying to take advantage of this, I'm just a contract programmer though and it's more exploiting licensing costs than anything. I don't really disagree with you.
Songza's headphone-specific equalizer made my Sennheiser HD 558 on iPhone much more enjoyable with the profile for HD 580. Hope they provide a profile for HD 558. Hardware headphone amplifiers are obsolete. Software equalizers are the solution.
Huh? Equalization and amplification are rather orthogonal concerns.
For many mobile sources, you'll really want one for 250 Ohms. The HD558s by comparison are really low impedance.
An EQ can certainly help make your headphones sound more "interesting" or "better" though.
What?
My headphones need a lot more power than is provided by a typical headphone jack. Not to mention the DAC built into most amps that gets rid of any line noise. Equalizers and amps are two completely different things, too.
I work for Google, so I know I'm totally biased here, but Play Music is pretty great, and it does recommend good new music to me, but the playlists by activity, mood, setting, genre of Songaza already look much better.
I can't wait till there's some integration and I can save Songaza playlists to my library and pin them to my phone.
Also, since Google Now began stalking my search habits, I get all kinds of useful recommendations about when artists I like release new material.
The acquisition of Songza will likely make a great product even better.
The recommendations are really great, though.
I was getting quite antsy with the lack of music related features. Google Music was feeling so.. lacking. I was close to switching back to Spotify, or trying something new.
Glad to see something is still being worked on heh
Is play music more established than songza? I think yes, and google is unlikely to maintain both of them in parallel.
I hope Songza continues and become even better. :)
Erm.. you got it backwards, folks.
No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.
If Songza was Youtube-like size, then yes. They are tiny so, yeah, unlikely.
So for anyone looking to cancel their account as I did, it's not really advertised anywhere. Go to legacy.songza.com, log in, click on your profile->settings then you will find a big red delete button.
I only discovered this after I tried to submit feedback asking how to cancel and got an automated suggestion with the above steps.
It's interesting you have to go to a legacy site to do this.
Indeed I'm not trying to start a "OMG everyone cancel your accounts!!" train, but I can understand why you (and whoever downvoted me) viewed it as a protest cancellation.
Hand's down it was the best selection of curated playlists that were easy to discover. Spotify had something roughly similar, but you had to search specifically for it, where Songza was more categorized. I kinda like thinking of it as the very early days of the Web -- Songza was the early audio Yahoo ... that was cross platform.
I've seen some great lists from Nokia Music on Windows Phone and some decent lists from iTunes Radio, but Songza was generally better overall.
I'll keep using it, so long as it is a stand alone app. Once that ceases, I may move elsewhere.
It seems they are now redirecting all playlist URLs to daily.songza.com though - can I still access them in some other way? Being able to import them to Spotify would be killer.
I'm curious, generally speaking does a founder still have skin in the game at this stage or do people generally get bought out?
I know it's a naive question for most of you, just curious how things generally play.
Apple tried iTunes Radio and that failed so they snatched Beats. Google Play is not gaining enough traction so they've now snatched Songza.
Is Amazon going to join the gang? Or perhaps Facebook acquire Spotify to up the ante?
I like the "Decade" breakdown and various genres you can filter by. The lack of genres or granular filters in Rdio is my biggest gripe with them (apart from my few issues with Rdio, it's still my favorite music streaming service).
Anyway, if you're looking for crowdsourced playlists, I would just use 8tracks
North Indian, South Indian, Hindustani, Carnatic, Film music from maybe a dozen different languages that are wildly different, qawwalis, ghazals, Rabindra Sangeet, music from different periods of Indian cinema... I could go on... sigh.
Insight is they are based off NY which makes they impervious to Indian laws. And personally, I haven't come across any good Indian website that gives you impression that you are buying legal content.
"You got to let that raga drop"
http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
(look at the bottom of the cloud)
Some exposition here:
http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=392
and in other posts there.
Or you could slice it by form: "Hymns, Choirs, Quartets, Symphonies, Concertos, Sonatas, Operas, Ballets, Rondos, Minuets, Gavottes, Chaconnes, Themes & variations, Musicals, Film scores, Popular & rock music."
Or by instrument: "Harpsichord, Piano, harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Guitar, Percussion, Electric Instruments".
I think the general point is that categories depend upon the listener. You can't impose a categorization on data without understanding who the audience is and what their mental model of the field is. And the more expertise you gain in a field, the deeper your categorization gets.
This is random, but one of the things I love about Civilization IV is that when you enter a new era, it plays music from that era, to really give you the sense of moving through time.
Except that when you enter the "Medieval" era, it plays this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g7jOKLUus8
A brilliant piece of music, and a great credit to them that they would have chosen this piece and this recording of it. An absolute masterpiece. Of the High Renaissance, that is. Sheppard was born c. 1515, and the Renaissance in music is usually dated to begin somewhere around 1400.
I guess I'm saying you're not the only one. :)
You're just complaining then about what the top-level nodes are on the classification tree of music genres. If you have Classical with Gregorian as a sub-genre that's the same thing as having Gregorian as a top-level genre. Same with OP's problem with "World Music" genre (except for the culturally insulting aspect of it).
The only time it could possibly matter is if the system doesn't have sub-genres... but that would be a pretty ridiculous system.
Really genres suck for a different reason, because they are vague and overlapping and subjective. What I want is a composable classification system with actual objective traits about the music... so I can say "female lead singer, german language, trumpets, beats-per-minute 80-120" and so forth. I don't know if such music exists, but I would listen to it if I could find it.
edit: didn't realize the Songza doesn't have any sub-genres of Classical, so include it as a "pretty ridiculous system".