When I first heard about Songza, I considered it somewhat of a competitor to Seeqpod, as they both let you search for music and give you the instant gratification of creating playlists on the fly, and hearing your songs immediately. But considering that Songza made its claim to fame by searching YouTube for the music content (thus giving you instant video gratification as well) and Seeqpod has a more broad search scope for its music options, it wasn't terribly surprising to hear that these two have now teamed up. Songza will be looking to Seeqpod, as well as Skreemr, to expand its search results for even more options with its insta-playlist functionality. According to the company, these partnerships will in fact expand Songza's effective catalog of songs by at least 12 million songs.
In speaking briefly with Songza founder Aza Raskin, I wondered if Songza was feeling any pressure to broaden its scope beyond YouTube for supplementing its search content. Raskin told me that " The plan was always to aggregate content from many sources. In fact, the original prototype used three sources, although we only had time to take the one source live for our initial release. With the addition of the new sources, we've gone from 15.5 million tracks to 27.5 million tracks that our users can listen to."
I first mentioned Songza here, when the company first launched its service as a subsidiary of Humanized. Songza has since spun off from its parent company (whose talent was recently snatched up by Mozilla), and today marks the first major update the site has undergone since its launch. In fact, Humanized's new connection to Mozilla may pay off for Songza, as the team plans on creating a desktop player for the music search engine with Mozilla Lab's Prism technology.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
That being said, you'll be glad to know that the fun doesn't stop there. In collaboration with Creative Commons, Songza is also launching a self-promotion beta program specifically for bands and record labels. For 99 cents, bands and labels can get a featured spot on the Recommended list on Songza's homepage. This couples Songza's search tools with the "sponsored link" mentality for the exposure of new artists (and some old artists, too).
So will this "micro-marketing" work? There are a lot of experimental models out there that are exploring ways in which to leverage the long tail of not only artists themselves, but consumers as well. SellaBand, for instance, is letting fans take ownership in the band's success, quite literally. According to Raskin, "We believe that there is a wonderful opportunity for Songza to give back to the community by letting smaller bands have a way to connect to new listeners. It is prohibitive for the little guys to advertise in the normal sense, but by micro-marketing on Songza they can reach the people they know will be interested in their music for a comparatively pocket-change."