One of many streaming music services, here is a brief walk-through of the latest 6.0 update that introduced free radio music streaming.
Getting Started
This latest updates greets new and existing users with splash screens giving a high level overview of the service. New and existing users are also given the chance to tune recommendations by choosing their favorite music genres and artists. This process can be skipped entirely.
What Do Free Users Get?
While Google Music has been around for some time, it is now available for free! Or rather, for limited functionality, Google has gone after the free music streaming market. So what does that get you?
Radio Stations
Free ad-supported radio! Lots of radio stations are available for you to choose from. Some are curated lists based off time of day, mood, activity, and genre. Ads vary from text to video. Some will start before a new station that you can skip, present an image before playing the next song that you have to close or simply a banner at the bottom of your screen.
Searches for any artist or album will simply suggest radio stations with like music. Additionally, you can search based off moods, genres, sub-genres, or activity (walking the dog) and get radio station suggestions.
Other limitations include limited skips. You can only skip 6 times per hour. And lastly, you cannot see what’s coming up next.
Listen Now
This will present curated radio stations based off the style of music you like, as well as recent radio stations you’ve played.
Top Charts
This features top songs AND albums. Selecting one of the top songs themselves will start a radio station based off that artist or song. Selecting a top album will let you choose radio stations similar to the album. At the top of this section, you can filter the top charts by genre.
New Releases
New songs or albums added to the service. Like top charts, selecting one will start a radio station. This section also allows filtering the music genre.
My Library
Free users can select the “Add to My Library” option when listening to a radio station. These are saved for you for quick access.
Browse Stations
This simply culminates everything into a big list for you to select from to choose a radio station. Genres, activities, moods, decades and kids are available options.
What If I Subscribe, What Then?
Want more out of the service? For $9.99 a month you can create an unstoppable service. With no ads!
In addition to all of the above, you can upload up to 50,000 of your own songs! iTunes user? Don’t fret. Google’s Music Manager service can automatically upload songs added to iTunes. Don’t worry, whatever you upload or purchase through Google Music can be downloaded. Another great benefit is that when you stream your songs back, they will be streamed at a higher quality than they originally were.
Radio Stations
One additional feature subscribers have regarding radio stations is the “Download” option. Selecting this will download the songs in the radio queue to your device for faster access and offline playback.
Playlists
What’s this? Free users do not get this feature. Playlists allow you to create your own music playlists by adding, subtracting, and reorganizing whatever songs you want to jam to. These playlists can be private, or publicly shared.
Playlists can be searched by artist, album, genre, mood, or activity. Suggested playlists will be available in your results. You can stream these playlists and add individual songs to your library, or even the playlist itself.
Three automatically created playlists are the Thumbs Up, Last Added, and Free and Purchased. Tip – Since you cannot choose individual songs to download to your device for offline playback, I have opted to “pin” or download my Thumbs Up playlist. Now every song I give a like to is automatically downloaded to my devices.
My Gripes
Two features I really enjoyed were removed with this latest update; Explore and Sub-Genres.
Explore simply gave you recommendations on new music to try, from artists, to genres, to playlists or stations. This was a great way to view public, user-created, playlists.
Sub-genres simply allowed you to filter down from Metal to Funk-Metal. Now you have to search for specific sub-genres.
Despite this, I do enjoy the service and Google has stated that they do plan to bring these features back. I eagerly anticipate this.
Check These Out
Here are some stations and playlists I have enjoyed.
- ’80’s Training Montage Radio
- Roundabout Radio
- Lights, Camera, Strut! Radio
- House Cleaning Playlist
- Fun Mix – Created by me. Always adding more.