9 years ago
18
Google Play Music Goes Free, If You Don't Mind the Ads
With Apple Music preparing to launch its subscription service next week and Taylor Swift criticizing its royalty payment plans, forcing that tech giant to change course, it's a busy time for the music industry. On Tuesday, Google is going in the opposite direction of Apple's $10-a-month service, launching a free, ad-supported version of its $9.99-a-month Google Play Music in the U.S. The company says it's designed to give artists another way to...
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I love Play music. Awesome.
Edit: I'm giving it a spin, and their redesign is wonderful, this morning channel it made for me is fantastic!
I have been hoping for just this for a while now. I'm very excited.
Sounds like the Spotify free tier. I was on Google Music for a while on their $10/mo plan, got annoyed enough with it to leave for Spotify.
Can you elaborate on what was annoying? I used to pay for it up until a few months ago and I thought it was fantastic.
Streaming in the browser and on my phone would frequently just stop. Sometimes it would stop playing music, then suddenly skip to the next track. When I was on a VPN, it would intermittently stop playing. I haven't had the stops and starts with Spotify. They drove me nuts on Google Music; I tend to listen while I work and it's very distracting for songs to keep stopping and starting.
Wow, yeah, those are legitimate problems.
Come to think of it, I did notice some stops from time to time, but it wasn't enough to dampen my experience. I also just never liked Spotify's interface much, but certainly many people prefer it.
I've never been a huge fan of their radio channels. I might give them a go with this change and see if they've improved them at all. Before, it was just repeating the same songs over and over with no real music discovery going on. They do have a great selection for their on-demand service, though.
I love Spotify and don't plan on leaving, but I hope to see this set a standard in the industry. Giving people a chance to try different services before signing up creates more competition, which will fare out much better for the consumer.
Praise DuARTe!
It's taken a while, but his design principles are finally starting to shine.
I love Play just for the option of having all my music available on the cloud. I'm not a huge fan of the subscription services, so hopefully they'll still be cool about this.
I have the "cloud to butt" Chrome extension installed, and did a double take when I read this comment tree.
Completely agree with you though on the usefulness of having all music stored on the cloud. I moved away from iTunes a few years ago and have never looked back. Google Play can do so much more, and has a much better interface. Part of me wishes they'd incorporate podcasts as well as music, but I guess you can't have everything.
I have a limited data plan so I do not want to have my music stored in the cloud. I want to be able to download one time.
They have to deal with a few savvy users like yourself among everyone that feature pulls in lol. You should be good as long as it lasts, especially now that there's a free tier.
As cool as this is, I think I'm still gonna stick with Spotify.
I have been hoping for just this for a while now. I'm very excited.
How annoying are the ads?
I'll wish i could switch back to Play Music, but gapless playback doesn't work for me while Spotify does it flawlessly. That's the only thing Spotify has over Play Music, though.