Songza Taking on Pandora

John Cusack in the movie Say Anything... (1989)

Music Player Timeline

When we look at portable music players, we have come a long way since the era of boomboxes and Sony Walkman: from CDs to minidiscs (MDs) to the first mp3 player, onto the iPod family and now online music players such as Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud and Songza. The shift not only means a decrease in the size of the portable music player, but more importantly a change in the ownership of content. Up till iPod, I can only listen to songs that I purchased, either physically in the form of a cassette or CD or digitally downloaded from iTunes. Online music players - using different angles/algorithms on recommending music - provide us with a plethora of choices. 

When Google announced the acquisition of Songza last July, I had been a loyal Songza user for over a year. While unhappy that my favorite music player now belongs to a tech giant famous for collecting user data, I wonder what this means for Pandora and the wider implications.

Songza vs. Pandora

• Curated vs. Personalized Playlists: Songza provides curated playlists made by DJs, while Pandora gives users full capability creating their own. For an unmotivated individual who just wants some music or a hard-to-please crowd, creating personal playlists sounds painful and unrealistic;
• Ads: Songza has no audio ads once the playlist starts (although there are occasional pre-roll video ads) while Pandora interrupts the user experience with not so targeted messages (massage school in VA? No thank you.);
• Full customization vs. limited customization: This goes beyond the comparison between Songza and Pandora but I find it interesting that people don't always welcome having 100% autonomy, for example: defined-benefit pension plan vs. 401k, Match.com vs. OkCupid. When our choices are narrowed down a bit, we make decisions faster. When Pandora first came out, everyone is amazed by the precision of song matching based on the Music Genome Project, but then the majority is overwhelmed, if not intimidated by the amount of choices to make.

Lessons Learned

From an app development perspective, there is a lot to learn from the success of Songza. Easiness to sign up, navigate and play music intuitively as well as limiting our choices all make this a small but mighty music player app.