Google Play Music All Access goes live in the UK

[Guest Zarch1972]

As usual, we in the UK trail the US releases and its taken 3 months for Google's unlimited music service to hit our shores.

But you can now Sign Up for a 30 day trial, followed by a special locked in price of £7.99/month for being an early subscriber. Normal price will be £9.99 after this initial deal expires on 15th September.

Is the £7.99 price enough to prise away people from Spotify who are paying £9.99?

What annoys me though is that I think Google have screwed us in the UK (as per usual)

The trial price in the US was $7.99 (£5.15 converted), $9.99 in Australia (£5.85) and $10.99 in New Zealand (£5.65), yet we have to pay £7.99

Grumble Grumble. :(

Will those of you who sneakily signed up the US version be moving over the UK service? Is a UK based release schedule and playlist worth an extra £3/month to you?

Have you signed up yet? Let us know what you think of the service.

Via [ Google Support ]

Click here to view the item

[Guest pelms]

Signed up last night when I saw the notice after uploading a couple of albums to GP Music. I'm also in the middle of a Spotify Premium trial as well.

The Google implementation integrates really well with GP Music app letting you add albums or tracks directly to you music collection where they appear alongside your uploaded and bought music. I've also found the GM mobile streaming (over 3G) to be more reliable than via the Spotify app so I'll very probably go with this over Spotify.

£8 per month is embarrassingly cheap considering the amount of use I'll get out of this. They don't pay much to the artists as it is.

[Guest keveh]

There are two main issues that are stopping me making the switch from Spotify:

1. I only every use the desktop version when I'm in work, I can get that for £5 from Spotify but only have one price option with All Access

2. No desktop app.

I really do like Google Music, the Android app is great and I was blown away when I first started using the in browser player (which has been improved since I last used it).

As I would be using the in browser player the majority of the time there are too many issues that are stopping me from doing so, such as:

• Not being able to use my keyboards music control buttons
  
• Having to look and go to the relevant window and tab to do anything
  
• Closing the window/tab my mistake
  

I tried to install an extension for Chrome to add controls wherever I saw but it used stupid shortcuts such as Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow to go back a track when that's used for selecting a word across the entire system.

So for me there isn't enough of a difference to make me want to move and pay double the price.

[Guest everett_psycho]

I'm giving it a try, I like it, particularly it's integration with the play music app that has all my music already, so I can plug holes like the Beatles with my own collection all in one app, it's a best feature that I found missing in spotify on my phone.

That said I'm coming from the £4.99 Napster sub, the main reason we have that is for use on our squeezeboxes, in this sense play music is useless. Not sure what I'm going to do yet, I like having music on my phone and I like the squeeze boxes, was trying to avoid paying £9.99 a month as well, may well be a case of trial this for a couple of months and see if using it on a HiFi at home is good enough

[Guest SilentBob]

Does anyone know how the trial works at the end? I.e. Will it auto subscribe and take payments unless you cancel by a certain date? Or is it the other way round, and you have until a certain date to opt in in order to get the £7.99 fee? Thanks.

[Guest Dan Mullen]

Does anyone know how the trial works at the end? I.e. Will it auto subscribe and take payments unless you cancel by a certain date? Or is it the other way round, and you have until a certain date to opt in in order to get the £7.99 fee? Thanks.

You sign up and get 30 days free, then they take your £7.99 unless you cancel before the end of the trial. That's what happened when I signed up to the US version anyway. Speaking of which,,,

It would be handier for me to switch from using my US credit card to my UK debit card. I don't mind the extra £2.50 (or whatever it works out to be), but I don't want to cancel my locked in price of $7.99 without knowing FOR SURE that I can get the £7.99 price. I'm wondering if they'll consider me as already having had a free trial so I don't qualify for the lower price in the UK?

Anyone done this?

[Guest Voxpop2011]

Something else for google to screw up.

I have ditched the Play store completely because it suddenly stopped working for me and others. None of the fixes works and I don't need it now anyway.

[Guest WearTheFoxHat]

Anyone done this?

Might be worth a second GMail account just to give it a whirl to see what's needed.

For me, I like the Google Play interface. I'm currently a Spotify Premium subscriber, mainly because I use:

Queues

Playlists

Offline Playlists etc.

Having a desktop app is great too.

Also I like thinks such as the BBC Playlists within Spotify and having other vendor tie-ins such as Onkyo support.

Until GooglePlay Music matures, I'm not sure it meets my needs. Although granted Spotify does tend to go through phases of being cancelled and re-activated ... similar to Sky! :P

[Guest masterpfa]

Not at this price

I have not been a great user of these types of services in the past, having used SPotify for a short period I found that I could live without it.

But worth considering for those that do have a use for this.

Watching this space

[Guest pelms]

I'm giving it a try, I like it, particularly it's integration with the play music app that has all my music already, so I can plug holes like the Beatles with my own collection all in one app, it's a best feature that I found missing in spotify on my phone.

That said I'm coming from the £4.99 Napster sub, the main reason we have that is for use on our squeezeboxes, in this sense play music is useless. Not sure what I'm going to do yet, I like having music on my phone and I like the squeeze boxes, was trying to avoid paying £9.99 a month as well, may well be a case of trial this for a couple of months and see if using it on a HiFi at home is good enough

I've also been using Spotify on my Squeezebox Touch which has a (fairly rudimentary) Spotify app. I've been able to stream GMusic to the Squeezebox using Cast To UPnP/DLNA for GMusic which makes your UPNP devices show as ChromeCast devices so you can just use the ChromeCast button in the GMusic app. This works well though you don't get gapless playback unfortunately.