Play Any Song at Songza

If you're into music discovery, there are plenty of services that can help. But if you're looking for a specific song, few services can oblige. There's something about being a "music on demand" service that rubs the RIAA the wrong way. Songza, a new Web jukebox that lets you play essentially any song or songs from any artist you can think of, fills that need.






The beauty of Songza is that you can listen to almost anything you're interested in just by typing in the name of a song or the artist. I couldn't stump the service with artist names, no matter how obscure I tried to get. The service is incredibly simple--there's less actual discovery involved because you have to know what you're looking for in order to use Songza. Unlike a lot of music discovery services, there are no categories on the front page, no genres to select, and no guiding hand to suggest featured tunes or artists. When you visit Songza you're presented with a search box and a search button.



Songza is a jukebox in the truest sense of the word. Type in what you want to hear and Songza will find it for you, along with any similar songs or artists. If you find a song you'd like to play, just click to play it right there in your browser.



The embedded player at Songza is in Flash, so there's no downloading, and the song stays safely behind the scenes at Songza. Even though you can't download the song, you can click to share the song with others, and Songza will generate a widget that you can embed into your blog, MySpace or Facebook profile, or other Website. You can also link to the specific song, send it to a friend, or head over to YouTube to watch the music video, all with one click.



When you type in an artist or a song and see the search results, you can click a song to do a Google Music search for the artist's discography, or click "buy" to do a Google Products (formerly known as Froogle) search for bargains on the artist's albums.

As you use Songza to find songs, you can add them to your Songza playlist and slowly build a list of songs that you can return to and play later. Songza may look bare, but the music engine behind is powerful and remarkably complete. All of the songs I listened to played smoothly, and there were dozens of hits for everything I searched. It's not totally clear where Songza is getting its music, and some of the songs sound like amateur recordings. Even so, Songza is one of the first Web jukebox sites that allow you to search so easily, embed and share the songs with friends, and generate custom playlists.