Why is it always a surprise to folks that Google Play Music exists? Everyone talks about Pandora, Spotify, Apple, or Amazon, but Google Play Music is never in the conversation.
I definitely agree. I normally use Songza, but while out of country I had to give a different service a try. I did the one month trial, and it was fantastic.
Compared to every other service I've now tried (Songza, Spotify, Grooveshark, Rdio), Play Music is great!
Fwiw, Songza is actually in Google Music. Google bought Songza a while back, and a couple/few months later Songza playlists were available in Google Music.
It was nice because i could then cache my favorite Songza playlists and cache them on my Google Music App. Handy
For sure, that's part of why I love Google Music. They included Songza's "mood and activity" playlist picker, which is great.
My biggest issue with Songza was the lack of selection. They have some great playlists, but after listening all day they get pretty repetitive. Google Play seemed to have the benefits of Songza with way more selection.
That's not really true in my experience. Used it in many European and other countries and it worked just fine. Sometimes some artists are service/region-limited, but that's because of their stupid labels - this mostly affects the top100 ones.
I.E the 'Google Photos' treatment. Now that Google's got the playbook for that rebrand down, hopefully they'll apply it to some more of their overlooked products.
This varies quite a bit, but I've noticed it a lot more with music that uses studio compression to get more 'volume' than with music mastered for clarity.
Bitrate doesn't necessarily correlate with audio quality, you can even perceive noise or a drop of quality in the audio of the less popular songs.
I'm seriously thinking that Google just licensed the audio they're streaming, but they didn't even care about getting proper audio files and they're simply streaming the audio their users uploaded.
In my country there was a big scandal a few years ago when a couple of radio stations started playing Billboard Hot 100 songs. I guess they couldn't source the new songs in time from reputable sources for some reason (licensing restrictions, logistical failure, no idea...).
So they simply downloaded them from local torrent trackers. The thing blew up, because a guy that was uploading and seeding the albums put his own catchy promotional jingle in the middle of most songs.
I had the same observation about Google Play Music Radio's audio quality and came on here searching for the bit rate and codec thinking it must be lower for the free radio product in order to segment and further differentiate the paid tier (many services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora do this). I'm using an external DAC+headphone amp. Also, note that the codec matters. AAC is supposedly twice as efficient as MP3. iTunes Radio, which streams at 256kbps AAC, sounds better to me.
I use it and it's great.