The Songza Interview

Internet radio platform Songza has built its reputation on the so-called Concierge method of music curation. The Concierge service seeks to understand the user’s mood and activity, match it to time of day, local weather, and other signals, combine all that with historical music preferences, and deliver a perfect soundtrack (playlist) for the moment.This method of playlist discovery has been imitated, most recently by “The Sentence” in Beats Music. Rhapsody,iHeartRadio, and others have also gone down this path to varying extents.Wanting to know more about the anatomy of Songza Concierge, and also how it ties into monetization through ad sales, we spoke with Elias Roman, CEO.Roman emphasized the Big Data operation within Songza as the beating heart of Concierge, and referred several times to the importance of context in predicting what people want to hear..