Google’s new music service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and a myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lovers.
The All Access service represents Google’s attempt to grab a bigger piece of the digital music market as more people stream songs over mobile phones. Such services are also meant to further wed smartphone users to Google’s Android operating system, where the search leader makes money from advertising and transactions on its digital content store, Google Play.
For a monthly fee, All Access lets you listen to as much music as you want over an Internet connection. You can also download songs onto mobile devices for smooth playback later when you don’t have cellphone or Wi-Fi access.
It’s worth a try for the discounted monthly rate of $8 if you sign up by the end of June. Those who sign up later will pay $10 a month, the same amount charged by the main competitors, Spotify and Rhapsody. Either way, you get the first month free and can cancel at any time. All Access works on the free Google Play Music app for Android devices and over Web browsers on computers — but not on the iPhone. (Spotify and Rhapsody work on both Android and the iPhone).
Visually, the app that I tested on Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone is engaging. Iterating on the list-heavy layouts of its competitors, Google Play Music jazzes up the interface by adding plenty of big artist photos along with little animations.
Some of the touch features require a pixie-like dexterity, though. It’s one downside to this solid entrant to the world of unlimited music streaming.
You can re-order songs that are in your queue on the fly — something not offered by either Spotify or Rhapsody.
The options icon on each song title (three dots stacked on top of each other) is also tiny and caused frequent mis-taps. This means a lot of accidentally playing songs and mistakenly erasing queues that I had spent time creating.
Where the service starts to get interesting is in its radio function. Like other Internet radio plans, it takes some traits of a particular song and finds others like it.
Google Play Music attempts to do something that Samsung Electronics Co.’s Music Hub did before it. Music Hub, which launched last July on Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone, blended four things: a music store, an online storage service, unlimited song streaming and an Internet radio player.
Google’s app does all those things. In addition, because it comes as an update to the existing Google Play Music app, it preserved the music I took the trouble of uploading to my Google Music storage space prior to the revamp.
