Google Play Music’s unique features

A huge selling point for Google Play Music is the upload your own music feature. If you didn’t know, Google Play Music allows you to upload up to 40,000 of your own songs to its service and play them from any of your devices, anywhere. This is a really useful feature for those who have songs downloaded already, and or have songs that aren’t on the Google Play Music library. No other streaming service provides this.

One advantage that Google Play Music has over every other streaming service is the fact that it is part of a very vast and fleshed out ecosystem. Even more so than Apple Music. Google’s ecosystem isn’t exclusive to a series of products. It’s available on every platform and every device. This is a huge selling point. You’re probably wondering how an ecosystem gives a music streaming service an edge over its competitors. Well, if properly integrated, an app within a working ecosystem allows the user and the app to do things that would simply not be possible if the app was standalone and not part of an ecosystem. A great example of this is the latest Gmail refresh. Because Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and Keep are all part of the Google ecosystem they can work together seamlessly — sharing information, updating their content and etc. Of course this can be done with API’s. But some ecosystem features cannot be done with API’s. One almost exclusive to the Google ecosystem. The Google Assistant.

Google knows a lot about you

As you know, Google knows a lot about you. More so than you probably think. Whether or not you think this is a bad or good thing is a discussion for another time. What we can all agree on is the fact that because Google knows so much about you this gives them the ability to suggest and tailor music to you that it knows you are more likely to listen to and enjoy. Imagine you watch a YouTube video and it has a song in it that you find catchy. A button built into the YouTube player that would let Google Play Music scan the music and automatically add it to your playlist would be very useful to a lot of people including me.

Another example of Google knowing a lot about you helping out in the music streaming service is their knowledge of what you search for and where you go. Say you’ve recently been very interested in Linkin Park, searching for them a lot online, reading up on them, watching videos about them and etc. Because Google knows this it could suggest more Linkin Park songs for you to listen to. Another instance of this would be if you went to a concert. Google would know where the concert was, who played in it, and be able to suggest more songs for you like the ones you heard in the concert. All without you every asking or searching for it.

Of course these features would need to be refined so they don’t become intrusive and stay useful. Ideally there would be settings that would allow you to choose how much Google suggests music for you based on what you do online. An assistant tab in the app would probably be the best way to handle this. A bit like the assistant tab they have in Google Photos.