Google Play Music — English Catalogue
Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry
.“35 Million songs on demand, Ad-free radio with unlimited skips, Create your own playlists and Listen to anything office” — This is what Google play music has.
With Google and Apple entering the Music Streaming industry, I personally feel like they get an unfair advantage against Spotify, Pandora and other competitors as Android phones come inbuilt with Google play music. They also have local library support and they have a big say on mobile device usage.
Every time I think of Google, I’m like “Man, Google is nothing but a big fat internet stalker”. They track my locations cause I use Google maps, they track my searches because I use Google Chrome, they track my Video search because I use YouTube, they track my work as I use Google Sheets/Google docs and finally they track my Schedule on my Google calendar among a million other things that they track.
They literally stalk me on every website I go to with Google ads coming and tempting me to buy that product I thought of buying but decided against and showing me that house I was interested to shift into but couldn’t afford. And now what do they do? They try to invade my music space. MY MUSIC SPACE. But nope, they failed because I use an iPhone, and ain’t nobody got time to use Google Play Music on an iPhone.
However, I did try out google play music on an Android phone. As expected, I was able to find everything I searched for. From Coldplay to Iron Maiden to Hillsong to Periphery to Ed Sheeran to Lorde. But here is the biggest plus point of google play music. If something is not available on the platform, they will give you YouTube results, which in my opinion is Google Play Music’s biggest advantage. YouTube has almost every thing I’m looking for. The chances of something not being available on YouTube is very small. So this is probably the MVP of Google Play Music in my opinion. Having YouTube as a backup for songs that aren’t available is probably the biggest backup any software can have.
Google play music also supports videos, (Yes, via YouTube again) and this again plays a massive role in capturing the video watching music lovers. Spotify are trying to get into the space but they are still at a starting stage but Google play have the biggest player in the Video industry on their side which boosts them up a lot.
Google Play music also has a stations feature which has three primary categories of “Language”, “Categories” and “Mood and activity” which have sub categories to them. I didn’t really get a chance to try it out, but it seems quite straight forward.
All in all, I think Google Play Music seems to have the biggest library in terms of much and no one is even close to it thanks to the YouTube integration. I am honestly super impressed and surprised by Google Play Music. I’m a big fan of Google as a company but I Google Play Music was something I didn’t try just because I was so happy with Spotify.
Will I switch from Spotify to Google Play Music? Nope.
Why? Spotify has all the music I want. Their UI and discovery is INCREDIBLE and video isn’t something i’m looking for.
Note: This is the third article among a series of articles that I will be writing related to the music tech industry under a publication called “Uncovering Music Tech”. Do let me know what you think. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn Here, Instagram Here and my Twitter Here.
