Music App: Songza

Before I get started talking about Songza, let me just say that I still love Pandora.  It's great for road trips and when I'm looking for something pretty specific.  The only problem is if I listen for more than 2 hours at a time sometimes I hear the same thing over and over again.  But it doesn't stop me, I love it.

My super tech savvy husband, Stephen, first told me about Songza.  He told me to download it and he let me discover it's awesomeness on my own.  It's available on Android and Apple products.  According to Stephen, "Songza is to Pandora as Pandora was to Radio."  I think if it catches on it will change the way we listen to streaming music, again.  (Isn't that the beauty of Internet radio - it's always changing and someone is always coming up with something new and better?)

For the past three days I've been listening to Songza at work and I'm loving it.  It's new and therefore there aren't any ads to break up the music... yet.  There are ads on the screen while the music is playing, but I'm looking at my computer, not my phone screen.  Working in advertising, I have a feeling that's changing at some point - let's just hope it's a little bit further down the road.  I've been crazy busy, so sometimes it's just background noise so I can't hear the people around me, sometimes I'm answering emails and I can really pay attention to the music playing in my headphones.

Here is how it works.  The App knows what day it is and the time so it guesses, intelligently, where you are at that moment and what you're doing.  Based on where you are and what it thinks you're doing it will give you options to start down a path to get to a playlist.

The two screen shots above are the first two screens you'll see.  The first screen is where you can pick your general genre of music.  The screen shots are from Stephen (on an Android) and when I opened the App one of the options was different - I also had Working (without lyrics) instead of the Office Crowd Pleasers.  Little bit jealous, but moving on.  Once you pick from those six options, we picked Weekday Dance Party (of course), you're brought to the next screen you see above.  What kind of dance party do I want?  Such great options.  I chose '90s Party Hits.  

Did you think that was going to be the last option?  NO!  You still get more choices so you get to exactly what you're looking for.  Once I selected '90s Party Hits I had three more choices, the first screen shot above.  I went with At a '90s School Dance.  All of the school dances I went to growing up were in the 90s so I wanted to relive some of those moments.  Once that's selected you're taken to the last screen, the black one, where you hit play to begin listening to music.  You can also see a few other playlists that are similar to the one I chose on my path.  Tell me you couldn't listen to all three of those, too!  100 Worst Songs Ever, '90s Workout!  Come on, those are so great!

At my '90s Dance I've heard some Boyz II Men, Backstreet Boys, Fresh Prince of Bel Air and UB40 just to name a few.  It's everything I could have wanted.  Part of me wants to go back to see what my options would have been if I chose Epic Walking from the very beginning, but let's be honest, I'm enjoying reliving Prom too much to leave this playlist.