Google Play Music for iPhone
Editors' Review
by
Joshua Rotter
/ June 30, 2015
Google Play Music offers curated radio stations, based on your musical preferences or moods, that you can enjoy anywhere via Android, iOS, or the Web.
Pros
Curated radio stations: Launch a radio station by searching and selecting a song, artist, or genre. In our tests, this feature pulled up additional songs that worked well with our initial selection. Improve your experience by up-voting and down-voting tracks.
Different listening experiences: Click Listen Now for a host of curated radio stations based on decades, days and times, activities, and moods. You can also create stations based on new releases or what's topping the charts this week.
Song blocking: While some of you may appreciate explicit songs, others may not. So we appreciate that Google Play Music offers the ability to block songs that are too racy for your ears.
Free tier: Google Play Music is completely free to stream (with limitations) from any device.
All Access trial: We recommend that you try the premium All Access tier, which is free for 30 days. After that, it's $9.99 per month. With a premium account, you gain access to the YouTube Music Key (currently in beta), which enables you to enjoy ad-free YouTube videos and offline music streaming.
Cons
Google account required: To sign in to Google Play Music, you must have a Google account.
Not enough free features: If you want on-demand play, unlimited skips, offline listening, and track importing (up to an impressive 50,000 tracks), you'll have to pay for the service.
Bottom Line
Google Play Music's free service is only a poor approximation of its paid one. We respect an artist's right to get paid, so we're not expecting the moon with a free account. But even Google Play Music's paid service doesn't wow us with a lot of unique features. So if you're already on Spotify, for example, you have little reason to switch.
