Songza Is Shutting Down, But Its Best Features are Already in Google Play Music

Over a year and a half after being acquired by Google, music streaming service Songza is shutting down on January 31.

Starting today, Songza users will be greeted with a prompt encouraging them to transition to Google Play Music. At an event in Toronto, Google Play Music product marketing manager Eric Davich said that listening history, saved stations and other personal data will be carried over from Songza.

The service was popular amongst users for its Concierge feature—human-curated playlists that were tailored to various activities, times and situations, such as music for the beach, music for dinner parties, or music to fall asleep to.

In the months following the July 2014 acquisition, Google slowly incorporated some of Songza's best features into its own Google Play Music Product, while continuing to keep the two products separate. Concierge was integrated into Google Play Music last fall for paid subscribers, and Google made the feature available for free for all to all US users in June with ads, ahead of the launch of Apple Music.

Google also announced today that ad-supported playlists are now available for free to all users in Canada as well.

As previously announced in October, podcasts will also be added "in a few months," said Davich.

Songza's shuttering comes less than a month after it was announced that streaming music competitor Rdio would too be shutting down. Rdio's assets and talent were acquired by Pandora, in mid-November but the product will be discontinued.

Songza claimed to have 5.5 million users at the end of 2013. Google declined to provide more recent user numbers for both Songza and Google Play Music.