Songza is a mood-based music streaming service that surfaces curated playlists tied to moments and moods. The company pairs sponsored playlists with banner ads and a 15-second video to create native advertising experiences for brands. It is developing native advertising further and scaling its sales team after hiring a dedicated brand manager. Songza has run campaigns for Taco Bell, Samsung, Nissan, and Vitaminwater and reports sponsored playlists receiving favorable feedback compared with organic playlists. The company also introduced Club Songza, a paid ad-free tier at $0.99 per week, and is exploring curation beyond music into short-form news and podcasts. Songza’s strategy emphasizes making ads feel like a natural part of the user experience rather than intrusive interruptions. Songza is a music streaming app built around Concierge, a feature that automatically matches playlists to users' activities, device, preferences, time and date. Since launching in September 2011 the service has expanded to iPad and Android and surpassed 1 million iOS downloads in 10 days. The company reported more than 2 million new users from the U.S. and Canada since June 1st, and overall retention is strong — over half of all users who have ever used Songza remain active. Songza collects activity and preference data to improve playlist relevance and plans to use location signals (for example, detecting a gym or beach) to serve context-appropriate playlists. The company also runs a guest DJ initiative that lets brands and celebrities create featured playlists and intends to expand that program. Songza provides free mobile apps for iOS and Android that let users create, store and share personalized music collections in the cloud. The service emphasizes expert and social curation, offering over 75,000 playlists created by music experts, celebrities, artists and record labels, plus user-created playlists. Songza’s library includes more than 14.5 million songs, and the service is free of audio advertisements and has no monthly listening limits. The mobile apps add social discovery via Facebook so users can tap into playlists their friends are listening to. CEO Elias Roman describes the product as a “music concierge,” positioning Songza around expert- and friend-driven playlist discovery rather than purely algorithmic recommendations. The company traces part of its recent history to Amie Street’s prior involvement: Amie Street sold to Amazon and had previously acquired Songza in 2008.

Total raised

$6M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Sep 2013