Samsung’s Milk Music streaming service is about to go the way of, well, a litany of other discontinued music services that came before it.
On Friday, the company released a statement announcing that it plans to discontinue Milk Music in the United States on September 22—just about a month from now.
“We have made the strategic decision to invest in a partner model focused on seamlessly integrating the best music services available today into our family of Galaxy devices,” the statement continues. “We believe that working with partners will accelerate innovation, enhance device sales and provide amazing new experiences for our customers.”
The story behind the story: Samsung introduced Milk Music in 2014 as a streaming alternative to Google Play Music for users of its phones. The Slacker-based radio service let you create your own stations, or listen to pre-programmed ones, a bit like how Pandora works. At the time, our Florence Ion wrote that Milk Music is “Samsung’s way of inching toward its own complete app ecosystem—even as it continues to support the apps and services built into Android.”
According to Variety, “[t]he writing for Milk Music was on the wall” since Samsung laid off several executives related to its media efforts last month.
Milk is gone, but…
While Samsung may have given up on its own branded music service, the company’s decision to rely on strategic partnerships doesn’t necessarily mean its apparent goal of declaring app independence from Google is dead. One possible outcome is that Samsung will work with those partners to build a Galaxy-specific app for one of its partners that conforms to the look and feel of its Galaxy devices.