With Apple Music being somewhat controversial with its free 3-month trial period, it does have an advantage because of that as it gives listeners more time to become acquainted with the service before deciding if they want to pay for it. Now it seems that Google does not want Apple to have all the fun.The company has recently announced that they will be introducing a free tier to Play Music. This free tier will be supported by ads, naturally, but there are also some limitations. Unlike services like Apple Music, Beats Music, Tidal, and Spotify, the free tier of Play Music will not be an on-demand service meaning that users can pick and choose what songs they want.
Instead the free tier will offer up curated playlists, kind of like listening to the radio where you don’t really have much of a say as to what is being played, although you can choose different playlists that are more suited to your tastes overall. According to Google Play Music’s product manager Elias Roman in a statement to The Verge, “They want the music to be awesome. They want it to be contextually relevant, but they don’t want to tweak a lot of knobs.”
There are also other restrictions such as giving users six skips per hour, no rewinding or scrubbing through songs, or even see what song is coming up next. Also in case it wasn’t already obvious, there will be no offline listening for the free tier. The free tier is also limited to those living in the US for now.
These are all features that can be unlocked if you were to subscribe, but in case you wanted to take the service for a spin to see if you like it, then this could be a good place to start.
Filed in . Read more about Google, Music and Play Music.