We Knew Them When
Songza Use Explodes, "Pandora Investors Should Be Concerned" Says Analyst
This missed me entirely, but good for them. I checked out the site, it looks kind of cool...they have a very wide range of selected, eclectic programs in many genres. For those who may not remember, Songza was started by the Amie Street guys after they were bought out.
A blog post by a single analyst sent Pandora stock tumbling 12% in two days this week...Earlier this week, Songza became the #1 iOS music app for both iPhone and iPad....
Songza was the #1 iPad app overall - not just music.
Songza is currently the #2 iPhone app overall ahead of Instagram.
Since launch on 6/7 the Songzas iPad app on the evening of June 7th, the app has generated more than 600,00 installs.
This missed me entirely, but good for them. I checked out the site, it looks kind of cool...they have a very wide range of selected, eclectic programs in many genres. For those who may not remember, Songza was started by the Amie Street guys after they were bought out.
Comments
I just went to the site and got a choice of 5 kinds of music for late Friday morning. One was "Music for work or Study (with lyrics)". I would actually prefer without lyrics, but can't see a way to get more options. So I went with that one. It gave me a choice of 5 genres, none of which I would choose to work or study to. Not saying they might not be good choices for others, but personally at this point I'm stuck. I tried every other combination of options in the Music Concierge - it's never heard of ambient or classical or experimental electronic, which is what I would work or study to. Again, the choices are apparently a good call for a mass audience, but don't work for me. I can understand though that the function of the concierge should be for people who don't want to have to find things, and that's not me.
The browse all is a better way in - now I find that ambient goes with reading. Are there other ambient playlists? The similar playlists it offers are Indie Yoga, Pastoral Symphonies, and Krautrock - two out of three are close but different, the other just different. Ah, "Also in Atmospheric" has some more promising ones.
So it's basically like Pandora but without having to think of a starting point? I can abstractly see that that could be useful. But I thought Pandora was a great idea, have an account, have it on my iPod touch, and I've used it maybe 5-10 times in several years and created maybe 3 channels. Emusic radio I used once. I have bazillions of internet radio stations in an app on my ipod touch and have used them maybe twice, to listen to sports events. And yet I listen to music incessantly. I think I'm probably just the wrong customer for this, unless (as you suggest) I can persuade myself to listen for discovery purposes every now and then.
ETA, I think I may have gotten so used to searching for things and listening to samples, that having random tracks go past me at full length to see if I like any of them feels like a very slow path to discovery. The website is very slick, though.
Perhaps they should have a series of playlists in which only 30 second samples are played and if you hear something you like, you click it and it takes you to a playlist that has full songs.
Actually, that was exactly how the emusic home page used to work with all those tiny album covers that you could sample, then link to each album page.
Looking at the Songza site it strikes me as having something like the Apple philosophy - smooth lines and minimal options, just go in and press play. While in very many respects my iPod Touch is a better user experience than my old Palm TX, one thing that I always liked better on the Palm than on the iPod was how much stuff I could reconfigure and customize in various apps, sometimes down to quite a lot of detail. I tend to like stuff I can tinker with rather than stuff that just works one way out of the box. I wonder if Songza will have enough things for me to fiddle with to make me spend time there. They have certainly done an impressive job on the interface overall, and I quite like the design (in the same way I like Rdio's design more than Spotify).
Hey yeah, what's up with that? No Makunouchi Bento-inspired playlists either. Personally, I'll be on the lookout for a "Have 25,000 Songs Yet Still Looking for Something to Listen To" playlist.
As near as I can tell, my preference for albums (and I do find it is really quite a strong preference - again I'm describing observation of my own prejudices as revealed in actions here, not taking a prescriptive position) is for a start something to do with preferring (i) to listen to a fairly consistent sound aesthetic for more than the length of the average track and/or (ii) to listen to longer compositions that have some sense of development in them. Doesn't at all mean I can't appreciate the well-wrought one-minute track. I think I just find that at any given point in time I have a sense of whether I want to hear, say, glitchy electronic textures, or pounding bass, or choirs and then I want to stick with that for a while. This does not rule out very consistent playlists (I do think the Songza mood feature is interesting), but it does give me a very big inner barrier to using shuffle very much. My wife on the other hand listens on shuffle all the time and often only buys one or two songs from an album.
So why albums over consistent playlists? Not sure. I don't mind a very well wrought playlist or mix - this one for instance is wonderful, effectively a work in its own right. But if it's well wrought then it is doing what I take many of the artists that I like to be doing when they put an album together - building a whole that is a shade more than the sum of its parts. I suspect that somewhere down there in the subconscious there is some kind of impulse to complete things as well. It bothers me a little at some level of consciousness if I am missing a track or two from an album or only listened to half of it. Maybe I was taught too well to eat all my vegetables. Maybe it gives me some kind of small sense of bounded achievement.
It's equally possible that a big part of what is driving it is still the formative effect of teenage years before downloads and with no money, when I could occasionally buy used singles but buying an album was a major and cherished event. I suspect, no, I know it still gives me more pleasure to buy a whole album online than buying individual tracks (even the same number of individual tracks), and I suspect that that history is a part of why. And there's more than a little of the collector impulse to have sets of things rather than assortments of things. Album = set, playlist = assortment.
FWIW I generally prefer novels to short stories - which does not prevent me being a huge admirer of the best short stories, it's just an average bias over time towards things that can unfold on a larger canvas. Though I like poems too. Funny.
1. Most of the works you've purchased recently obviously require at least one complete listening.
2. In general, I find that the integrity of albums is labored. In the best cases they evolve organically (unless they are preconceived as a single piece). In most cases they are formed by a sense of what a complete album looks like (tracks, length, moods, tempos, song forms, etc.).
3. Some collection not only can be parceled out into smaller pieces, it is necessary to do so. The collections that BigD and I download often are trying to tell a different musicological story than what can be done by "the album" or "the greatest hits compilation." (Some are just excuses to put a bunch of songs together without any further thought.) On the other hand, some things aren't meant to be heard all at once. It's not realistic to sit through three of four masses in one day or to listen to a monastery's codex, not meant to be heard at one time even though it could be described as an organic whole.
Part of what prompted my original comment was musing about how my reaction to big collections was different from (yours/)BigD's, especially when your reaction seems to me much more "rational" (simply in terms of getting a large quantity of music for little money that usually has some kind of generally recognized value, such as being by a famous composer etc, and is clearly by folk that you like). Your approach makes much more sense to me, rationally - but I find myself with sensibilities that make my own visceral reaction different, and suspecting where they came from does not immediately change them. One of the many ways in which music can help learn about oneself, perhaps.
It's not the only irrational reaction I've discovered. I find there are some genres where when I buy I feel like I am treating myself, and others, especially classical, where I feel like I am doing my homework or something - even if I actually like the classical album better than the other album and get a better deal on it. I know this is irrational and subconscious, but it's there and not quickly overcome.
If all of this is of no interest to anyone else, do tell and I'll shut up. I go through spells when it's very interesting to me to try to figure out what's really driving my choices.
Of course you have to watch where you step while crossing Compilation Street - or you could spend a lot of time scraping your shoes, but it just adds to the challenge of finding the righteous and the obscure which I am very satisfied when I can find.
I used to feel that way too: or, the sense of a theme and the length of tracks were measures by which I judge albums' complexity.
I don't download most of the large collections that I post here. Many end up in my personal SFL, and I contemplate getting one of them every now and then. BigD exercises some influence, particularly when it comes to old Blues and Jazz (greg and kez also influence my decisions). The allure of purchasing large collections comes more from a belief that I'll be more likely to get something of quality if there are more possibilities. A month ago BigD suggested several comps of Jazz guitar, and I picked one of the smaller ones because I felt that it better suited my needs and interests at the time.
Something that differentiates my listening (rather than my purchasing) is that I might like to get some further use out of what I hear. I spend a few hours a week transcribing tune and pieces that I find interesting. Most of it is Celtic, but also some Jazz and Classical. Mostly I'm interested in melody and improvisation, but sometimes I do more. Sometimes I intend to learn and play the tune myself, but I might just be interested in studying the stylings of the performer very closely. Consequentially, I might obsess over 1-2 minutes of one track, getting it in my head as much as possible, but delaying hearing an album in full until I do my transcription. Perhaps that is a neurotic way to listen, but I feel that listening at this level--understanding its DNA--contributed to how I understand the whole work.
I really hate duplication. That's where I'm irrational.
Duplication bothers me too.
And due to BigD and others I have downloaded some box sets recently, so this is all relative.