Ahead of the long-awaited and controversial launch of Apple Music next week, Google is making a last-ditch effort to pull users onto its own platform with a free option.
Google’s new free option will be ad-supported. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as good as Spotify’s free option because you’ll only have access to the curated playlists, rather than being able to “shuffle play” artists and song lists of your own creation. You’ll recall that Google’s playlists were inherited from Google’s acquisition of Songza, and they’re actually pretty good! (You will be able to listen to Apple Music radio without paying, by the way.)
Where does that leave the streaming ecosystem? Well in terms of actually paying for a service there are plenty of reason to choose Google Play Music over others. Of course if you don’t want to pay anything, I still give the slight edge to Spotify. Though, Google Play Music does offer a free 50,000 song online storage locker, which really no one can compete with.
We’ll have more to say on what you should choose when Apple Music launches next week.
