Google Launches Google Play Music All Access
by Saumitra Bhagwat on May 15, 2013 1:06 PM EST- Posted in
- Google IO
- Music
- Subscription
Google’s Chris Yerga took the stage this morning at the company's sixth annual I/O Conference to announce Google's own flavor of a subscription-based music service called Google Play Music All Access. All Access promises to leverage Google’s deep understanding of your preferences, listening habits and social circles to deliver a highly tailored music discovery experience.
Google aims to one up the competition by enabling users to get to their own and potentially new music (that they’ll hopefully like) as quickly and intuitively as possible. Google showed off a brief demo of the app running on Android, but the service can be accessed via a traditional web-based interface as well. The orange and white colored UI was slick and aesthetically pleasing, allowing users to instantly queue up songs and listen to personalized radio stations. The demo did however leave a lot of unanswered questions such as mobile cross-platform compatibility, support for traditional desktop operating systems and other features such as offline syncing, but we can definitely expect tight integration across all of Google's services, especially Google+.
Google Play Music All Access launches today in the United States for $9.99/month, with the promise of a gradual international rollout. There’s also a 30-day free trial and users that sign up before 30 June 2013 get a discounted rate of $7.99/month. It is unclear whether this is a lifetime or a limited time offer, but Google’s been known to be notoriously generous in the past, so we can always hope.
Although the subscription-based music streaming market is by no means nascent with heavyweights like Spotify and Rdio, Google’s undoubtedly beaten Apple to the punch here, which is long rumored to be developing its own subscription-based music service, presumably for launch later this year.
For the time being though, if you are in the US, head on over to Google Music and try All Access out for yourself.
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Grifous91 - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
I might be interested if you know, this was available in Canada. But considering how the original Play Music still isn't here yet, I'm not holding my breath.Razor 116 - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
Use a VPN once and it will work. I used a VPN when Google Play Music was not available in the UK and I have been given the option for the trial of "All Access" with the option to subscribe at the reduced rate.davegravy - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
Apparently you now need a US credit card to get into Google Music (except for grandfathered accounts). Presumably this same requirement will apply to All AccessLefflerHirthe - Monday, November 23, 2020 - link
I hope that they will provide ringtones and ringback tones for mobile phones. Before they offered this service, here are my options: https://dzwoneknatelefon.com/Friendly0Fire - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
So Pandora's not available in Canada, Spotify isn't either, and now All Access isn't either. I know we're the retarded neighbor of the US and all, but to me all those services are shit until they actually support more than a handful of countries.Penti - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
While Spotify which was develop here and is available in Sweden both Google Music and Books are not available here, neither is Pandora. Pandora's site seams to say it's only available in US, Australia and New Zealand. No Google Movies & TV or Play Magazines. iTunes doesn't really have any movie content available here and TV-shows is still not available, and has no market for them either, they have the store for music but not iTunes Match which is available to Zimbabwe but not Sweden. While Netflix is available here it's content offer aren't of that many titles, maybe sub 10k. No Hulu, and for the longest times competing services has tried to sell their services to customers even though they topped out at 3000 to 4000 titles. HBO is really the only service where you could actually follow a TV-show as it broadcasts. If it's not something done by the Swedish public broadcaster because they have streamed there own content for ages and nowadays even streams it internationally when they have the rights to do so. Not long ago mainly music/score rights hindered them from streaming even their own shows to say swedes residing in a neighboring country.Basically the rights situation still sucks, and you have to have the right agreements with all kinds of copyright collectives, you can't just go to the content creator, even though we are suppose to have a common market for everything in the EU every country handles licensing of music themselves and slightly differently which does block services from being available in multiple countries without agreements in each state. Though we don't really have any working ebook market in Sweden, because of more control at the writers disposal of their own works stuff like Amazons kindle book store is available with almost 2 million titles. Though in English only. People are quite happy to pay if they get a working service and a large catalog. Using stuff like Silverlight to stream (DRM plus none-accelerated VC-1) isn't really helping them though as it's often showing tearing even on a modern Ivy Bridge machine.
HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
Petition your government to surrender and send a formal request to become the 51st state of the US of A.Our government will then receive, file, and process your request. In about 100 years, we'll have considered your request and send it on to the exploratory committees in Congress that will investigate and debate the best ways to proceed with your request.
In about 200 years, I imagine the exploratory meetings will be concluded. By then, the Rakrak alien race that has slowly consumed all our minds with the Pink Sludge we've become addicted to will decide that Canadians truly deserve to become one with the Hive Mind. The Rakrak will have order the President and Congress to grant Canada's request.
Little do they know, the Rakrak will also be sending Pink Slime up as their welcoming gift to all Canadians.
Fortunately, we'll all be well dead by then.
boydo - Thursday, May 16, 2013 - link
Apparently these guys are part of the problem. There is problably a lot of greed on both sides of the equation. Result: Canadians don't get the music services they want.http://www.resound.ca/en/index.htm
Penti - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Licensing collectives everywhere is a problem, for example game content or book authors sit on their own or has agreement to use the work and can sell it on even to multiple publishers in the same country and ebooks has no geographical barrier at all to speak off.Dug - Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - link
It would be nice if someone could do a quality test on the streaming services.I don't have any way to test except my ears and I find Spotify to be of much better quality than Rdio or Pandora. At least when streaming from an iPad through Apple TV through stereo system.