In a bid to establish its presence on the online music market, Google launched its on-demand subscription music service “Google Play Music All Access” at I/O event in San Francisco yesterday. The service, which comes as Spotify’s rival, is currently available only in the U.S, but will be soon rolled out in more countries.
The fast, functional and highly intuitive service runs on the desktop and mobile alike, offering users tons on music content including songs from 22 genres that can be instantly played, tweakable curated radio-like streams, recommendations, charts and individual playlists. The music service includes millions of tracks from both leading recording studios (Universal Music, Sony Entertainment Group and Warner Music Group) and thousands of independent labels. All Access also pulls tracks from the Google Music locker, and these tracks get coupled with other music products by the artists.
The price tag is quite traditional for this market—All Access charges $9.99 for monthly subscriptions—and Sprotify Premium, which offers quite similar access to the music world, costs the same $9.99. Another big player on the market, Pandora, opens for $3.99 per month. To lure more users, Google offered a free trial month and a $2 discount for early adapters—those who sign up before June 30 will pay $7.99.
While being a huge bank for songs, the new service is not offering a good social integration—it has neither Twitter and Facebook buttons nor a real-time feed of songs the user’s friends are listening to.
It doesn’t seem that Google will be dominating the market with All Access—now, Spotify has over 6 million paying subscribers and more than 24 million active users across 28 markets, and it will be hard to beat this record. The launch of the service comes rather as an attempt to strengthen Google’s presence on the mobile market since it is critical to provide Android-based divices with the access to Google-provided music. With All Access, Google has also outstarted Apple, which is rumored to launch a similar service soon.
At the conference, Google also announced a series of updates to a range of its services. Among others, Google Maps were greatly reconstructed. The new version of the service is all-tailored to the users, helping them find a faster way to the desired locations, build personalized maps, discover new places and view all the imagery of a location in one spot. To learn more about the re-imagined Google Maps, watch the video below and visit the Meet the New Google Maps micro site.