Google feels sting of Apple's Beats acquisition, buys Songza

Not one to sit around and wait what Apple and Beats have in store for streaming music fans, Google's gone off and pulled the trigger on Songza. The music streaming and reccomendation service uses playlists created by 'music experts'  such as DJ's and music critics and tries to suit playlists to user's moods. Songza charges a US $ 0.99 weekly fee for ad free version of its service.

A post on Songza's blog states, "Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re becoming part of Google. We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use." It will be interesting to see what plans Google has of monetizing Songza as well as how they will position it against other popular streaming music services and its own Google Play Music service.

Source: Songza

Digital music sales drop for the first time since opening of iTunes Store

Looks like streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify are hitting digital music sales where it hurts. Billboard reports digital track sales have dropped 5.7 percent to 1.34 billion units for the first time in 2013 since iTunes Store opened 10 years before. Album sales also dropped 0.1 percent to 117.6 million. Streaming services that provide unlimited seem to entice listeners to subscribe to them instead of buying albums that cost roughly the same price.