Elias Roman

Google Play Music relaunches, smarter about you and your soundtrack

Posted on by RAIN News Staff

Google Play Music relaunched today, announcing an update that makes machine learning a bigger part of its listening experience. That means the platform will combine listeners’ individual music tastes with contextual information such as time of day and location to offer improved song recommendations. It all happens behind the scenes, based on Google’s understanding of the user. Another step closer to the “Me Button.” Continue Reading →

The Songza business: Conversation with Elias Roman, CEO

Posted on by Brad Hill

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. Continue Reading →