Google is the latest company to enter the increasingly-crowded market for streaming music services in the UK, with the launch of its Google Play Music All Access.

It joins Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Xbox Music, Sony's Music Unlimited, Rara and others jostling for attention among British music fans, although unlike those rivals, Google's service will have no free option.

All Access launched in the US in May, and then in Australia and New Zealand in July. Its UK debut is part of a wider European rollout: Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain are also getting it today.

In the UK, the subscription-based service will usually cost £9.99 a month, like most of those rivals, but people signing up before 15 September will pay £7.99 a month.

Google's service shares many of the features of its competitors: unlimited "on-demand" access to a catalogue of millions of tracks from major and independent labels; apps for smartphones and tablets as well as a website; recommendations for new music from Google's editorial team; and a personalised radio feature that streams songs similar to specific tracks or artists.

One of All Access' key features is the way it integrates with Google's cloud locker service, which enables people to store up to 20,000 songs from their existing digital music collection on its servers and play them alongside tracks from the All Access catalogue.

For now, Google's service will be a standalone subscription in the UK, although in the US, the company is reportedly in talks with telco Verizon to bundle the service into its mobile tariffs.

That's a model that already exists in the UK. Just ahead of All Access' launch here, mobile operator Vodafone announced that customers signing up to its 4G service when it launches later this month will be able to choose to bundle a Spotify or Sky Sports mobile TV subscription into their tariff.

Google sees streaming music as the latest piece in its growing suite of entertainment services offered through its Google Play hub, as it goes head to head with Apple's iTunes.

"With today's launch, Google Play moves one step closer to your ultimate digital entertainment destination, where you can find, enjoy and share your favourite apps, games, books, movies, magazines, TV shows and music on your Android phone or tablet," says Paul Joyce, product manager for Google Play Music.

Apple has yet to launch an on-demand streaming music service as part of iTunes, although it is preparing for the US debut this autumn of iTunes Radio, which will focus on personalised radio. A UK launch date has not yet been announced.

The British music industry has had a bumpy relationship with Google, welcoming its activities in legal digital music services, while regularly attacking the company for not doing more to downgrade piracy sites in its search-engine results, and to prevent its advertising network being used by these sites as a source of income.

Google promised in August 2012 that it would start penalising sites in its search rankings if they sparked large numbers of valid copyright-removal notices from rightsholders.

A few months later, the boss of music industry body the BPI, Geoff Taylor, was criticising Google for moving too slowly on this score.

"Google's transparency report shows they know clearly which are most infringing domains," he told The Guardian. "Yet three months into the much-vaunted algorithm change, many of these illegal sites are still dominating search results for music downloads."

Still, the music industry has welcomed Google's entry into the streaming music market, which is growing fast in the UK and elsewhere in the world.

BPI figures show that UK music fans streamed more than 3.7bn tracks in 2012, generating more than £49m in revenues for British record labels and accounting for 15.2% of the industry's digital music income.

Globally, 20m people paid to use subscription music services in 2012, according to another industry body, the IFPI, which has highlighted streaming's impact in Sweden and Norway as a sign of bright times ahead for other countries.

Music industry revenues were up 12% in Sweden and 17% in Norway in the first half of 2013, with streaming subscriptions accounting for 70.5% of all recorded-music sales in Sweden during that period, and 66% in Norway.

Labels are hoping fierce competition among streaming services in the UK can lead to a similar upswing in industry revenues, after more than a decade of piracy-fuelled decline.

Not everyone in the music industry is enthralled by this new business model, however. Some artists have spoken out about their dissatisfaction with the amount of money they get paid by Spotify and its rivals, which currently averages out at around 0.4p per stream.

Atoms for Peace recently reignited the debate by removing their albums from streaming services, with band members Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich tweeting their criticisms of Spotify in particular.

"Streaming suits catalogue but cannot work as a way of supporting new artists. Spotify and the like either have to address that fact and change the model for new releases or else all new music producers should be bold and vote with their feet," wrote Godrich.

"Catalogue and new music cannot be lumped in together. The model massively favors the larger companies with big catalogues."

Thus far, Spotify has been fielding most of the flak on this issue, but the entry into the market of Google – given that separate debate on its approach towards piracy sites in its search rankings – may draw some of the fire.