Songza.com is coming, an internet service that will combine elements of applications such as Pandora with applications such as Facebook. It does away with Pandora’s algorithms for user radio “station” creation, and allows online communities to get together and contribute to the creation a common station. It’s currently in beta.
The company has a library of some 8M songs, and in two years, has served over 225M streaming requests. The shared station concept will be a new step forward in the company’s development.
“Much of the joy we get from music comes from how it connects us to the people around us,” said Elias Roman, CEO of Songza. “Songza is unique in making it easy for people to connect using shared, collaborative radio stations. We believe this makes for a far more social and relevant experience than radio based on ‘experts’ or algorithms analyzing tone and timbre.”
The company said the new program is in beta development, with many new features set to be added. One of them will be a mobile application.
RBR-TVBR observation: Successful radio broadcasters have long known the value of building a community based on the shared love of a particular type of music. So here we go again – another internet interloper mimicking a broadcast trait. This further underscores the importance of emphasizing broadcast’s local advantage, which seems to be edging continually from one of radio’s strongest trump cards to perhaps its only trump card.
