Today we have streaming services that enable us to do thing on-demand. Want to watch your favorite TV show, listen to the new album of your favorite artist? Before, it was either buying it or pirating it.

Pandora and Spotify both use a freemium strategy that has brought them many users and also a good amount of paying customers for the premium membership. They focus on making music streamable and accessible for everyone. If you don’t want ads, pay a monthly fee and they will be gone.

Songza on the other hand was free. They did not grow as big as the other two leaders of music streaming but they had good customers. Songza focused a lot more on customizing music playlist for your specific mood and environment. Since the app was free, they got revenue from display ads and sponsored playlists.

While some artists might complain about the music streaming industry because it may be seen as “diminishing the value” (aka Taylor Swift), smaller artist might be happier about the possibilities of services like Spotify.

Today, it is fairly easy to publish your own songs on Spotify or Apple Music even without having a publisher or agency. Yes, the payout to the artist is small, but it enables small artists to get their music out to a massive audience and possibly get noticed.

 

 

When considering what people find important features within a music streaming app, we can see that variety and affordable are the most important. However, good playlists and algorithms to find new music are things that Songza focused on a lot.

This ability to customize the experience for different individuals is what Google realized when they decided to buy out Songza and integrate it to its Google Play service. Other streaming services have since adapted and come up with their own playlists for different situations or moods.

From personal experience I always highly recommend Spotify to people because I see it as a social media where you can control a lot of things like sharing playlists with friends, creating playlists together, and their release radar is doing a pretty good job in showing you undiscovered new music. It is perfectly tailored to your preferences and music history. Sometimes you discover completely new artists that fit your music style.