Take that, Spotify! At its I/O developer's conference today, Google took the wraps off a new music subscription service, called Google Play Music All Access, that blends your own personal music collection—songs stored in your Google Music locker—with all the music available in Google's entire library.
All Access, which launches today, will be priced at $9.99 per month. But the company is offering a fee 30-day trial, and it said that anyone who orders the service before June 30th will get it for a discounted price of $7.99 per month. The All Access service is available for phones, tablets, and computers, with a common interface across platforms.
Clearly, Google has Spotify in its sights, and probably the rumored upcoming streaming service from Apple as well. All Access has a few cool features: One, described as "radio without rules," creates a personalized radio station of unlimited recommended tracks based on songs you own or have played, and you have the ability to swipe away songs you don't like or change the order of the set list.
Another feature, Listen Now, lets you integrate tracks from Google's music library into your own personal library for immediate playback. A big plus is that all the tracks available to you—your personal music and all available streaming tracks—are aggregated into a single searchable library. Given that it's from Google, we expect superior search, and song recommendations.
We'll be giving Google Play Music All Access a spin in the coming weeks, so check back for our impression of the newest streaming subscription service.
