Google I/O Recap: Google Play Music All Access

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 16 May 2013

Google announced a new music service at I/O yesterday called “Google Play Music All Access”. That’s a mouthful, and I’m seriously hoping they change the name at some point in the future.

So what does it do? You’ve probably heard of Spotify, right? All Access is the same thing. You pay a flat fee of $9.99 a month and get access to “millions” of songs. How many millions? Google isn’t saying. The company emphasizes that their recommendation engine is better than everyone else’s, though it’s tough to say whether or not that’s true since the service is so young.

Also included in All Access is a streaming radio service. You’ll be able to skip an unlimited amount of tracks, and you even get to see what tracks are in your queue. You can setup a radio station based on an album, a song, or an artist. It’s not clear whether or not you’ll be able to make a playlist based on a keyword however, similar to how Pandora and Last.fm operate.

Where does this service work? Right now it’s America only, and Android only. That’s obviously going to change over the coming weeks and months, but I can’t make any predictions. If you sign up for a trial of All Access before June 30th, that $9.99 fee gets bumped down to $7.99, which is a plus.

Offline support is also included, though some people are reporting that Google’s servers are painfully slow right now at delivering bits. It’s also unclear what codec and bitrate Google is using. I’m almost positive someone is going to try the service within the next 48 hours, and we should hear more about those sort of details, including DRM.

[Image Credit: The Verge]