Here’s the Verge overview of the Google service. They have social network stuff, they have offline play. And unlike Spotify they let you just grab songs to add to your library (while you subscribe) instead of adding them as weird playlists; AND it integrates your owned music with your subscription music, so you don’t need to switch apps to move from playing your personal library and random streaming songs, which is a huge huge win for me.
Basically, Google Play Music is competing with Amazon and Apple (neither of which offer a subscription plan), and also Spotify and Rdio (neither of which offer a music locker/store). That alone makes it worthwhile. And yes, no iOS version, but it has a web version, and that’s all the platforms I care about.
The 900 million devices and 74,4% of all smartphones being sold. I’m sure that Google will try to get the service on iPhone (because, you know, why not?), but I’m also pretty sure that this is not a “problem” that they are going to lose sleep over.
IMO, it should be a bigger priority for them to get these services released properly internationally. Way too many things that are still limited to the US market only.
The thing is that if you only count people that have the income and are interested in a music subscription service you would see that 75% android market share drops like a rock. But even so IOs should not be a priority for Google Play music and other services unless Google is actually being serious about competing with Amazon and being a platform agnostic online store. To me the music announcement was the least interesting and just a check box feature offered by others at this point, even Microsoft was ahead of Google on this particular case.
Interesting about this year it was an actual developers event instead of a press conference, they are presenting a consolidated platform for developers with Android and chrome without actually turning them into a single product, and find it curious that every thing they announce is for Android and Chrome, and some for IOs, thus avoiding saying the Windows word that is probably forbidden there now, even though mos of there revenue still comes from the Windows platform.
Some questions now rise about Nexus hardware announcements are they close or months away, or is GS4 nexus announcement a signal that they are moving away from there own hardware.
Maybe I’m nuts, but the Google All Access thing sounds pretty good.
I use the music player on my phone every day to listen to my cloud-saved tunes while I work. The revamped app is nice so far. I’m thinking about checking out the free trial for All Access.
All Access is pretty damn nice. I really like the interface. Pretty slick all around - for $8 a month you get something that replaces Spotify, Pandora, and your local music player and is easier to use than any of the above.
I could be completely wrong about this, and if I am, I will take the public stoning. Apple is a good company, but in the last 2 years or so, I’ve been seeing less and less iPhones in people’s hands. I work in the tech sector(IT, not programming or anything fancy like that), and people seem more satisfied with android devices. Not that there is anything wrong with Apple, which there isn’t, but the folks I run in to like to be able to get their hands dirty in the guts of their mobile OS.
I can see there being a Play Music app for iOS in the near future, but I can also understand why it isn’t a priority for them. I imagine there will be a third party APP in the future.
I’m giving the All Access trial a try (I’m a long time Zune Music Pass user). I haven’t used it much, but so far it seems like a decent combination of Pandora and Zune/Spotify, plus the music locker stuff. I like the interface better than Zune (which isn’t hard) and Spotify. It also has actual genres, which was one of the things that drove me nuts about Rdio. I don’t need the iOS app, and I’m happy to actually have an app that plays on my phone. I do miss the desktop app, as it only works in Chrome, which means no media key controls. There is a 3rd party desktop app which seems to work, but I can’t seem to use my browser back button in it which makes navigating cumbersome.
It’s also so far more reliable than Zune. Zune would frequently have songs that just wouldn’t play because of some cryptic server issue. It also took a long time to start playing albums (which was correctable by changing some IE setting, but that made the first issue worse).
I tried downloading an album on my phone that I knew I didn’t have. It was a little slow, but when it finished a few songs I turned on airplane mode and was able to play the music fine. I don’t see any method currently for playing (non-purchased) music offline on the desktop.
