I've been trying out a different music service every few months, here's something interesting I found.<p>Number of songs:<p><pre><code> - Xbox Music 30 million.
- Apple iTunes 26 million.
- Amazon MP3 25 million.
- Spotify 20 million.
- Rdio 20 million.
- Google Music 18 million.
</code></pre>
I've most recently been using Google Music since I can upload songs albums which aren't available in their library (e.g. Beatles). However, Xbox Music is pretty neat too. It's actually pre-installed on every Windows 8 computer and you can listen to just about any songs without ads in high quality for free. (Not sure why Microsoft doesn't advertise this more.)<p>Other thoughts: Apple is the only one without a cross platform mobile offering. For I instance, I'd like iTunes radio on Android or Windows Phone. Spotify has by far the best social experience and Rdio has the best designed web/mobile interface.
The killer feature of Google Music is that uploaded music integrates well with subscribed music.<p>If you have an album that is not on Google's "all access" catalog, you can buy it from somewhere, upload to Google, and then this music is accessible from everywhere. Just like the music from the subscription catalog. I believe (not sure) that Google even integrates your uploaded music in generated radio playlists.<p>For someone who buys albums on local concerts, this is a killer feature. Many albums do not appear on any subscription catalogues, or they are not available in [YOUR REGION], or the labels wait months before they release a new album in the catalogues.<p>When I was using Spotify, I had a playlist of my favorite jazz songs minus the songs not on Spotify, minus the songs not available in Austria. And after two months, 1/4 of the songs were greyed out and did not play anymore because the label had decided to remove these songs from my region.<p>Now I just have a playlist with my favorite songs.
I'm experiencing a horribly broken login process.<p>* Open login screen<p>* Switch to password app, copy password<p>* Switch back to Google Music, login screen loads again<p>* Enter credentials, 2-step verification screen loads<p>* Switch to Google Authenticator, get 2-step number<p>* Switch back to Google Music, user/password login screen loads again.<p>In short, I cannot authenticate using a single device, I'll have to use a second device to pull up the 2-auth number.
I;ve been using Google Music on my android device and it is by far the best music app I've used (vs. Pandora, spotify, last.fm, etc). The killer feature for me is that it learns what I like and the radio stations it generates are pretty awesome. This may be helped by the fact that I uploaded my entire mp3 library as well.
For those who would like to port their Spotify playlists to Google Music, check out Portify: <a href="https://github.com/mauimauer/portify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mauimauer/portify</a><p>It isn't perfect, but it has been very helpful to me.
Really great to see this finally available, not only for the streaming service, but because at this point Google seems to be the only one dealing with music lockers the right way.<p>I've been using Google Music as a backup of my library for quite some time, but recently have found using it as my primary player much more convenient that loading iTunes and dealing with iTunes Match, which IMO, is broken. (there is a side story her about moving countries, but that's for another time).<p>Would love to see a Rdio/Spotify-esque native application as well, but that might be asking a little too much.<p>EDIT: The lack of a online/offline music toggle is really disappointing.
I find it amusing that since Google already had an established ad-based 'services' market before foraying into the mobile space with Android, they invest significant effort into making apps for iOS.<p>Whereas, since Apple has always been in the 'products' market, they don't (have to) invest any effort into the Android ecosystem. I think the first time I was ever exposed to adverts was with iTunes Radio.
Oddly enough, the thing that prevents me from fully adopting Google Play Music as my one and only music source is its performance on the desktop.<p>Perhaps something's wrong with my computer(s), but playing Google Music from a browser window regularly skips when my browser has to do something intensive in another tab. It's also easy for me to accidentally close the tab. And it doesn't interface with my keyboard's media buttons.<p>Using Google Music via my phone (a Galaxy Nexus) is great, and Play's featureset (purchasing of music, local storage, radio, uploading, etc.) is the best of all the options.<p>But the desktop performance of Spotify (along with a decent featureset and a good mobile app) is what keeps me a paying customer. If Google Play Music can solve that problem (or if there's already a way to address it of which that I'm not aware), then I would switch.
While it's not explicitly mentioned on the page, the Chromecast icon is visible in the screenshot, so apparently there's parity there with the Android app, which is nice. Google Music's web version strangely doesn't support Chromecast, leaving iOS people with no way of using Chromecast at all.
I can't really see this replacing Spotify for my streaming music services. If anything is going to do that, it's going to be Rdio. But I really can see this filling the hole in my phone that is streaming purchased content that isn't available through the streaming service. The fact that iTunes (or Spotify, or Rdio) doesn't have this is pretty disappointing. When I download an album off of Bandcamp, I have to download it to every computer I have iTunes on, and then sync my phone to listen to it. That's difficult, and it means I have slightly different libraries on every device I own. This is a decent enough stopgap until hopefully a better app implements it (preferably Rdio, because I'd love to move to them if it wasn't for their less than stellar music selection in comparison to Spotify).
I subscribed Google Play Music when they first offered the service and enjoyed it but I feel Spotify is much more conducive to 3rd party add-ons, I couldn't find many differences with the subscription based libraries (the ability to upload to google play is nice...but also free) and Spotify actually has an API, Desktop Application, actual 3rd party support. In my experience any 3rd party support (last.fm, etc) in Google Music breaks every release, which was the main reason why I switched back to Spotify. It may be a little more $ each month but I found the advantages Spotify has over GPM were worth the cost.
Neat, maybe I can convince my wife to use it. I haven't even touched my iPod since I started using Play Music (on Android) - although my biggest beef is that you can't store your offline music on an SD card.
Music services I have tried: Google Music, Xbox Music, Spotify, and iTunes. After using each for over three months. I have stuck with Google Music. Why I did go with the big G? It was the ability to upload all my music (up to 20,000) songs to the cloud. This plus Google All Music, covers my music need well! The ability to upload my own music to the cloud strikes a good balance for me. I hated having Spotify and not finding what I was looking for. Then I was stuck transferring MP3s to my phone. Now, my library syncs from my iMac to Google.
If Apple ever rolls out a subscription music service this will be removed from the App Store, right? Or is it that you just can't sign up for Google Play Music through the iOS app?
My biggest problem with Google Play Music was always the size of my library. I have almost 180 gigs of music. I think I used GPM the first week it was out and obviously my whole library didn't get uploaded. I wouldn't mind so much if it simply kept track of what my newest music was and deleted unlistened to music. If I have to manually manage playlist of what can go on the service then I might as well just put the music directly on my phone or iPad.
I won't be switching from Rdio until the web app has a way to pin music to devices. I think Google Music is definitely a more featureful product and would use its ability to upload my own music in some cases. But I can't be bothered to go through all my favorite albums on a little mobile screen and pin them.
I tried it out when it first came out...just to see. But I wasn't nearly as happy with it as I am with Pandora. Maybe when the youtube service comes out it'll be worth paying if it comes with both, but otherwise I'll stick with pandora and torch music.
I can figure out how to download stuff so it is available for offline playing, but I can't figure out how to filter out only content that is available offline.<p>This is a feature available in the Android app as an "On Device" filter. Has anyone figured this out?