Google unveils Spotify music competitor All Access: Here's what we think

Chris Yerga, engineering director for Android at Google Inc., pauses while speaking at the Google I/O Annual Developers Conference in San Francisco on May 15. Google Inc. introduced a subscription music-streaming service.

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Jon Xavier: Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Proving all those rumors true, Google Wednesday unveiled its own streaming music service, which will compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora.
The new service, called Google Music All Access, is an add-on to its current Google Music streaming service that allows users to stream music from Google's library of 2 million songs, in addition to any song they upload to their personal music library, for $9.99 a month.
As a long-time user of Google Music, and given that the first month is free, I figured there was no reason why I shouldn't check it out.
It's an interesting service that feels like a kind of hybrid of a lot of the other streaming providers on the market. Like Spotify, All Access lets you search for and stream specific songs, albums and artists. Like Pandora, it lets you turn any artist or song into a "radio station" that will mix tracks from that artist with other, similar music.
Google's implementation of this seems to build on top of the existing Instant Playlist feature, which analyzes songs to deliver similar music to listeners. This means it goes a bit beyond Spotify's radio station, which just plays songs from the same genre or artist. It's not quite as good as Pandora's music recommendation engine, which in my experience excels at discovering new songs and artists, but it's very close.
The new streaming service is also closely integrated with Google Play Store, meaning if you do find a song or an artist you like on it, you can buy an album with two clicks. It's probably not going to be a hugely-used feature, given that you can already listen to the song for free just by subscribing to the service, but I can see it being useful for people who have bandwidth limits on their mobile devices or who want to burn a mix CD. You could even put your songs from Google Music on your iPod, if you're into that. Moving a song out of the cloud and into local storage is completely seamless on an Android device, and only a little more difficult on a PC, requiring you to have installed Google's Music Manager software.

What music streaming service do you use most often?

This survey is not a scientific sampling, but offers a quick view of what readers are thinking.

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Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.

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