Google Introduces A Free Tier For Its Play Music Service

Google's Play Music streaming service is trying to take some of the thunder away from the Apple Music launch by announcing that it will offer a free, ad-supported tier to users who are adverse to paying $9.95 a month for the paid subscription.

Unlike the paid tier, users won't be able to choose their own songs to play on-demand, but will instead play songs from curated playlists in a radio-like fashion. This isn't new to users, as it's also the way that services like Pandora and iTunes Radio work.

What's a little different is how the playlists are categorized. Listeners can choose between lists such as Driving or Working Out, or even "What would Beyonce do?", so it will be interesting to see just how well the playlists fit into those activities.

The technology used in this tier basically comes from the now defunct Songza, which Google acquired last year.

The new free tier might not be enough to counter the boulder that is rolling downhill in Apple Music, but at least it made some news as well as made people aware of the Play Music service again.

That said, the real news will come later in the year when Google's YouTube Music Key is officially introduced, which is expected to have a much larger impact on music distribution.

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The Songza Feature That Google Couldn’t Resist

In a deal rumored for weeks, Google has finally acquired the music streaming service Songza for a reported $15 million. There appears to be no immediate plans to change the service, according to a post on the Songza site, except to “make it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.”

But what’s the real reason behind the acquisition? Certainly Google has the cash to buy either Pandora or Spotify, market leaders in the radio-like non-interactive and on-demand categories of the music streaming market. The fact is that even though both of those services have the largest user bases in the sector, they actually bring little value in terms of what Google needs. The company’s Music Play All Access service doesn’t have the kind of subscriber numbers it wants, but that could be just a matter of time, considering that YouTube (which it owns) is the number one online source for music discovery and access already. And the company already has a large catalog of licensed songs, so a purchase with that in mind is redundant.

What Songza specializes in is music curation, a feature that Beats Music used as its primary lure in its purchase by Apple. While Google may be the king of the algorithm, it’s been proven time and again that computer generated playlists can’t come close to the musical taste of human. It’s been reported that Pandora’s Music Genome Project, which many contend is the heart of the service, is already 10 years in the making. Google has the resources to bump that timeline up, but the way the streaming market is heading, time is of the essence. Google needs a similar feature right now. Read more on Forbes.

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Who Will Be The Last Streaming Service Standing?

Reports last week that Google is in talks to acquire Songza, a six year old music curation and streaming service, show that an industry-wide rollup in streaming services is now in real possibility. This is on the heels of Apple snapping up Beats Music recently, and may be a sign of things to come in the sector.

Although Songza is a relatively minor player in the space with only 5.5 million active users, it does show that the major players are interested in acquiring infrastructure or feature parts they don’t currently have in order to quickly compete with the other major players. Songza is known for its music curation, which could be immediately integrated into Google Play Music All Access (perhaps the world’s worst brand name) in order to compete with an anticipated new Apple streaming service. Beats Music’s main feature is also curation, and having Apple jump out in front with that feature would require Google Play to catch up even more than it has to already.

It’s still unclear whether curation is the killer feature that music consumers want though. A trusted source has always been the key to popularizing new music, from radio DJs to MTV to music critics, but as of yet no single curation source has risen above the rest online as the de facto standard. In fact, it can be speculated that curation doesn’t actually matter much at all, given the fact that Beats Music subscriber numbers are so low at between 110,000 to 250,000, depending on what you read. It was the feature that the service hung its hat on, yet it wasn’t something that consumers flocked to when it became available.

That said, there are indications that we’re beginning to see what has been predicted as a slow rollup of smaller streaming players that will eventually leave only the major players of Amazon, Google and Apple, and maybe one or two of the smaller ones, standing. Read more on Forbes.

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