Google Acquires Curation-Focused Music Streaming Service Songza

Google has acquired the popular music streaming service Songza. A report published by the New York Post early last month pegged the then rumored purchase at just $15 million, but the official price is yet to be disclosed by either party involved. Update: The New York Times reports that Google paid more than double that initial amount:

The price was not announced. But a person briefed on the deal, who was not authorized to speak about its terms, said that Google paid more than $39 million for Songza. Representatives of Google and Songza declined to comment on that figure.

In its official announcement, Google praises Songza's focus on offering playlists created through curation (as opposed to using algorithms). It also notes that while it plans no immediate changes to Songza, it may integrate the technology behind the service into its products, particularly Google Play Music and YouTube:

Exciting news today — we’re thrilled to welcome +Songza to Google. They’ve built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren't planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users. Over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music. We'll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products.

Songza's own announcement also notes that "No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use." Songza is free to download on the App Store, with a monthly $3.99 in-app purchase offered for the ad-free Club Songza option. Note that the service is currently available to users in the U.S. and Canada only. Of course, Google's purchase of Songza is considered a move taken to counter Apple's acquisition of Beats Music, another music streaming service that prides itself in its focus on curation over algorithms. In other acquisition news in the world of music streaming, Rdio announced earlier today that it had bought TastemakerX, the startup behind the music discovery and curation service of the same name. For its part, this move is seen as a countermeasure against the acquisition of the music intelligence platform The Echo Nest by rival Spotify last March.