News - 24/06/2015

Google Play Music’s new free streaming option unlikely to impact Apple Music's launch

Google Play Music’s new free streaming option unlikely to impact Apple Music's launch

Google Play Music has unveiled a new free  streaming option in what is quite obviously an attempt to counter the launch of Apple Music in just less than a week’s time. 

The new free option will be ad-supported and will be limited to playlists that have been generated by the service: users will not be allowed to stream individual songs.

The playlists being made available are likely to be sourced mostly from Songza, the streaming service that Google acquired in 2014 and that has formed the backbone of its radio offering.

Google’s free service then is not quite as flexible as Spotify’s but on the other hand Google offers a hard-to-match music locker of 50,000 songs which allows users to store pretty much their entire MP3 library in the cloud and access it wherever they are for free. It is a remarkable service that works in tandem with the subscription if one chooses to pay. 

Apple Music appears to be offering a similar service to subscribers by enabling them to upload any music that is in their library but is not available on the streaming service, however the tracks uploaded in this fashion will not be available for streaming but only for download - presumably to get around licensing restrictions. This effectively means that subscribers of Apple Music will no longer require an iTunes Match subscription, but that iTunes Match subscribers who do not want to join the streaming service will be able to carry on as usual.

Google Play Music offers a very good service today and it will continue to make sense for Android users, but iOS users may find that Apple Music’s deep integration will serve them better.

In addition, Apple is making its first play in the Android marketplace by introducing an Apple Music app later in the year. This is the first foray for Apple into a competing mobile ecosystem and the company may well hope that it will - like its Windows iTunes desktop client back in the day - lead customers who are using iTunes on their computers but have an Android phone to join the service.

Google’s launch of a free option for its streaming service is good news, but it is unlikely to stop Apple Music from quickly gaining a substantial number of users, provided the service launches without major issues or outages.

 

(Andrea Leonelli) 

© 2024 All rights reserved. Rockol.com S.r.l. Website image policy

Rockol

  • Rockol only uses images and photos made available for promotional purposes (“for press use”) by record companies, artist managements and p.r. agencies.
  • Said images are used to exert a right to report and a finality of the criticism, in a degraded mode compliant to copyright laws, and exclusively inclosed in our own informative content.
  • Only non-exclusive images addressed to newspaper use and, in general, copyright-free are accepted.
  • Live photos are published when licensed by photographers whose copyright is quoted.
  • Rockol is available to pay the right holder a fair fee should a published image’s author be unknown at the time of publishing.

Feedback

Please immediately report the presence of images possibly not compliant with the above cases so as to quickly verify an improper use: where confirmed, we would immediately proceed to their removal.