Playing With Play Music All Access

A few weeks ago, Google simultaneously announced and released its new Play Music All Access service on May 15th, the first day of the I/O 2013 developer conference it held in San Francisco. I was already excited about I/O, but the release of All Access caught my interest in particular because I was starting to get tired of Spotify and its limitations (especially the lack of landscape support on Android, which was remedied only very recently). Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of a free trial and reduced pricing (available to early adopters through June 30th), and I started playing around with the service.

It's a bit sad that the first thing I got excited about in my experience with All Access was that Google finally updated the Play Music Android app (better late than never), which had been obnoxiously buggy and difficult to navigate at times. It quickly became clear to me that Google paid meticulous attention to the app's new design, because the app is now a pleasure to use, as compared to the crummy old Honeycomb-styled version (good riddance). The new app is a lot more responsive, doing away with most of the lag that had plagued the old version, and it has a considerably more sensible interface, both on phones and tablets. The new slide-out menu on the left makes it easy to navigate to all the important screens from anywhere in the app, and the familiar three-dot menus enable you to dig deeper into the app as needed in a fairly intuitive manner. I'm not sure what the design of the forthcoming iOS app will be like, but I'm assuming it will be similar, with some minor differences (as with the Android and iOS versions of the Gmail app).

The web interface mirrors that of the app, which is a great thing – UX consistency is something that Google has struggled with in the past, and progress towards a more polished user experience is something to be excited about. Navigation is straightforward, and everything pretty much just works (with the exception of some hiccups on Linux, which are specific to Google Chrome and are in the process of being fixed). Lately, I've actually found myself using the web player instead of my computer's native music player (Windows Media Player on Windows 8 and Clementine on Kubuntu 13.04) because it is that easy to use. Music discovery can still use some work, but I've gotten pretty good mileage out of the Related Artists functionality and, of course, the Radio feature. Still, Radio is definitely not yet on par with Pandora or Last.fm – it's really just an upgrade to and rebranding of the old Instant Mix feature, which was a second-rate competitor to Apple's iTunes Genius that never seemed to work quite right.

One unique aspect of All Access is that it seamlessly integrates with your music collection, to the point that, on Android, it can be difficult to distinguish which albums are physically on your device and which are streaming from the cloud via All Access – the only thing that gives streaming tracks away is the requisite buffering time, which is very short if you have good 4G signal (one of the few good things about being shackled to Verizon's network). As some technology writers have pointed out, Google is currently the only company that gives you the option of uploading your own music, buying individual tracks or albums from the Play Store, or streaming as much (or as little) of its entire music catalog as you want for a flat monthly rate, all under the same roof. The ability to bring your own music to the table is particularly important in light of the fact that Google's streaming music catalog isn't quite as well-developed as Spotify's – the superior streaming selection is pretty much the only Spotify feature I've missed since canceling my Premium subscription and deleting my account).

Overall, I've been very pleased with Google Play Music All Access (quite a mouthful of words and a decidedly unsexy nomenclature that some critics have brought up) so far, and I hope that Google keeps expanding its music catalog (please add some more Luna Sequence) and tweaking the radio algorithms (hint: when I start a song station for Shade Empire, that means I don't want to listen to Shinedown). One last note – while this isn't an issue for me since I live in the United States, All Access currently isn't available in any other countries, as opposed to Spotify and similar streaming services. The fact that workarounds have been discovered mitigates this issue somewhat, but of course such unofficial means are not endorsed by Google and may be killed off at any time. Google plans to expand the service to other countries eventually, but that will take some time, since, as we all know, international music licensing is complicated (and expensive, but Google has deep pockets).

--lbds137