Rock out without taking your wallet out
Google today added a free radio tier to its Google Play Music service. It's an ad-supported option for music lovers living in the U.S. who don't want to pay the $9.99/month subscription for the full service. It's Google's hope that the free tier will entice listeners to eventually become paying subscribers.
"We hope you’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll consider subscribing to Google Play Music to play without ads, take your music offline, create your own playlists, and listen to any of the 30 million songs in our library on any device and as much as you’d like," Google product manager and Songza CEO Elias Roman stated in a blog post. "You’ll also get ad-free, offline and background features for music videos on YouTube. And with or without a subscription, you can store and play up to 50,000 songs from your own collection for free."
The announcement comes just one week before Apple's own subscription-based streaming music service kicks off. Starting June 30, Apple Music will be available with a three-month free trial, followed by individual plans that run $9.99/month and family plans for $14.99/month.
I've been a Google Play Music subscriber almost since day one. It's still not as good as Spotify, but I stick with it because I signed up during a promotional period where the monthly fee was $7.99/month. Google Play Music is a bit feature-thin overall, though my a favorite part of the service is creating radio stations based on songs I like. It's a great way to discover music.
The free service operates similarly in that aspect -- you can type in the name of a song and play a radio station that offers related tunes. Alternately, you can pick radio stations based on your mood and popular activities, such as "Brand New Music," "Driving," "Working Out," and several others.
The free service is available now on the web and will roll out to Android and iOS later this week.
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