Google Play Music All Access
My thoughts on Google’s entry into the subscription music market
I am a heavy user of Google’s services. Gmail, Maps, Drive, Android, Keep,Voice, Plus, Chrome…you name it, I’m probably utilizing it. So when Google Play Music All Access (I think I’ll just call it All Access) was announced, I was very interested. I’ve been a Spotify Premium subscriber for a little over a year and have been satisfied with the product, although I felt there was significant room for improvement. I’ll compare my experience with Spotify with my early impressions of All Access.
All Access excels in two areas I feel Spotify has yet to master: Collections and Discovery. In Spotify, if you wish to retain music for future listening, you must either create a new playlist or Star it. In All Access, you can add the music to your Library, which is essentially your collection of music in the cloud. The Library feature allows you to use the playlist section for its true purpose: creating mixes of different tracks from different albums or artists. Spotify announced a Collections feature on December 6th, but six months later, it’s nowhere to be found. I’m tired of waiting.
While I definitely started listening to more music after I joined Spotify, I found discovering new artists to be difficult. Sure, in the desktop version of Spotify,there are third party apps devoted to music discovery, but I wish there was a more native solution. When I leave Spotify’s desktop app and switch to their web or mobile apps, it seems that the Related Artists section of whomever I’m currently listening to is my best hope for finding something new.
All Access, in my early testing, seems to do a great job of finding me new artists I might be interested in. Sure, you can find Related Artists and start a radio station based on the current artist, just like Spotify. But in All Access, you can really dive in the genre and subgenres of the music you’re interested in. Do you like dance music? Here, let’s check out the most influential albums of the genre, or the current top tracks. Want to listen to some ambient tracks while working and be sure you won’t get distracted by dubstep? All Access has you covered, with the top albums and tracks in each subgenre.
The best part about the music discovery experience with All Access is that I can do all this regardless of the device I’m using. The web and Android apps work in the same manner.
Sometimes when I want to listen to music, I don’t quite know what I want to listen to. When I open Spotify, I’m faced with a barebones list of my playlists, or a mountain of information on new releases, what my friends are listening to, and the top tracks in my area. Occasionally, I’m so simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed that I’ll give up and turn on the radio.
In All Access, the default Listen Now screen gives me a plethora of options tailored to my taste and my Library. I can replay the album I most recently listened to, start a radio station based on a song or artist in my Library, or play a suggested new release—all within seconds of opening the app.
My praise may seem effusive so far, but the Android app has some pretty critical problems that are hindering my enjoyment of the service. They involve the most important part of a music service: playback.
The Android app offers two levels of streaming quality, low quality and high quality (up to 320 Kbps). “Low quality” is an accurate description; it’s awful, especially considering that I’ve been spoiled by Spotify’s clear sound. If I select the app’s high quality streaming option when I’m away from a WiFi connection, it matches Spotify’s quality, but only for five seconds at a time. The music pauses to buffer every five seconds, even if I have a crystal clear 4G connection. Not acceptable. If Spotify can master mobile music streaming, surely Google can, right?
The result of this streaming trouble is that I must download every song I might listen to on my phone when I’m not on WiFi. It also keeps me from using the great music discovery tools I outlined above. Also, even if streaming was working well, there are reports that All Access uses an excessive amount of data.
In All Access, Google has the beginnings of what could be a very special service. They clearly spent a lot of time designing the experience and its recommendation algorithms. It’s never been easier for users to find new music. Now Google needs to make it easier for them to actually play that music on their mobile devices. Otherwise, Google’s finely-tuned unlimited experience will remain limited by their current app’s streaming shortcomings, and users will return to more reliable services.
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