Google finishes porting Songza's features to Google Play Music and will shut down Songza on January 31
Google will shut down Songza on January 31, 2016 — Google today announced the Songza website and app will be killed off on January 31, 2016. The Google Play Music team …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's shutdown of Songza closes out an acquisition it made for its contextual-playlist technology: the Google Play Music team has finished absorbing Songza's features, so the standalone app's job is done. The move lands the same month Beats Music fades out, as streaming services prune overlapping brands.
What makes this worth tracking is what came after: Play Music itself was later slated to be replaced by YouTube's music service, and Google has since repeated the same consolidation play across Podcasts and Play Movies & TV. The Songza kill date is the earliest clear instance of Google folding a property into a bigger brand rather than maintaining it.
First-order effects
- Songza users have until January 31, 2016 to migrate, with the app and website killed outright and no transition path except into Google Play Music, which now carries the ported features.
Second-order effects
- The consolidation pressure runs both ways: Beats Music's own fade-out the prior week shows Apple and Google simultaneously collapsing secondary music brands into their flagship services, shrinking the number of distinct destinations competing for listeners.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's product portfolio becomes a staging ground where acquired or adjacent apps are absorbed into YouTube-branded homes — a sequence later repeated when Play Music users were forced to a new service and podcast subscriptions were pointed at YouTube Music — training users to expect any standalone Google app to be temporary.
The trend: Google is steadily dissolving standalone media apps into consolidated YouTube-branded services, with Songza the first in a line that ran through Play Music and Google Podcasts.