(The Verge) As Apple Music nears its June 30th launch, Google is getting more aggressive about trying to sell users on its own Google Play Music service. Today the company is launching a free, ad-supported tier that offers curated playlists (a la Songza) designed to accompany every moment of your day. The handpicked stations themselves aren't new; Google brought them to Play Music's paying subscribers last year after its acquisition of Songza. But now everyone in the US can listen; the curated playlists are available today on the web and Android, with an update for iOS also due very soon.
For Google, sticking with playlists was an easier approach to free music than the on-demand, ad-sponsored tier that Spotify offers. The free half of Spotify's service has been the subject of harsh criticism from musicians who feel the company underpays artists. Google seems confident it can avoid this by going the "music radio" route, and its existing licensing agreements guarantee a big selection at launch. If you can already stream a band's music with Google's subscription music service, all of those same tracks will be part of the now-free radio side. (Yes, that includes Taylor Swift's back catalog.)
The difference between this and Spotify is that with Google you never have control over exactly what songs are playing. Google Play Music product manager Elias Roman seems to think that many people won't mind, since he believes most consumers are after an effortless "lean back" experience. "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," he told The Verge. The company's team of music experts has assembled every curated playlist from top to bottom. Here, Google shares the same "humans over algorithms" philosophy that Jimmy Iovine and Apple Music have been pushing. Whenever you pick a mood, genre, decade, or activity-based playlist, you can be confident that an actual person programmed what you're hearing. But Google does lean on algorithms for some things. If you start a new radio station based on a particular artist or song, that's when everything gets handed off a computer.
