Back in June on this year Google announced that their music service would finally be coming to iOS "soon" and I jumped at the then introductory rate of $7.99 / month to lock it in! Then the waiting began...
Fast forward to this past Friday 11/15 a full 5 months later, it finally has arrived! After the long wait was it worth it? For me the answer is YES! You decide...
Google Music is a FREE cloud storage for your local music. It is akin to iTunes Match, except it is free and lets you access you music in a browser or Android/iOS device. It even plays nicely with iTunes. Once you set up the music manager it will automatically scan your iTunes library and upload all the music. Any changes you make later down the road will also be uploaded.
Google Music All Access is Google's subscription service that is $9.99 (or $7.99 if you signed up early) and is akin to Spotify. It is not a competitor to iTunes Radio although it does have a Radio feature like Pandora or iTunes Radio. Basically, All Access gives you access to stream any song that is available in the Google Play Store at any time ad-free. It also lets you add albums or songs to your library of uploaded music so it is all in one place. If you unsubscribe obviously all the music you added that wasn't your own will disappear. It also has recommendations like Spotify that shows you music you may be interested in. The Android/iOS app will let you download music to your device whether it is your own music or All Access music. You just go into the album and there will be a small orange downward arrow. Tap it to "Pin" the music locally on your device. You can try All Access for a month for free.
So as you can see these two services are completely different. iTunes Match is nice for local music but it cost $25 a year and will only let you access you music from an Apple Device. iTunes Radio is simply Pandora that has access to all the music available on iTunes. It doesn't let you pick what song you want to listen to. It just generates playlists based off an Artist, Album, or Song. It let's you skip songs a few times and it has ads unless you have iTune s Match. If you are someone who just flips on a radio playlist then yes, iTunes Radio is nice. But if you are someone who wants to listen to a specific song or album at any times, wants to build playlists, etc. then obviously you want a subscription service such as Google Music All Access or Spotify. If you want that but you only listen to music on your computer then you can probably suffice with Spotify's free service. If you want all that music on the go then you will have to pay monthly.
One last VERY important thing! If you have multiple mobile devices in your family listen up. Spotify only lets you listen to music on one device at a time, pausing music on your device when someone else logged into yout account starts using their app. Google Music All Access... does NOT do this! For me this is huge, allowing all of my family to listen to whatever we want on demand at the same time.
Happy Listening!
