Google has announced a free radio feature for Play Music, allowing users to listen to ad-supported curated playlists.
Apple is set to launch its own music streaming service with a three-month free trial later this week, but Google has tried to steal some of the attention by making the radio feature from Play Music available to all users in the U.S.
Initially launched as a premium feature for subscribers, the Play Music radio will now be ad-supported and available for all Google Account holders. The songs will be handpicked and added to various playlists by music experts from Songza, a company acquired by Google last year. The playlists can be filtered based on their genres, moods or situations or by searching for artists.
Google already allows users to store their own tracks with Play Music, but it hopes that the new radio feature will encourage them to pay for a subscription and get access to a library of 30 million tracks on all devices.
The free streaming radio is already available on the web version of Google Play Music, while the Android and iOS apps will get it within this week. Google is expected to launch the feature outside the U.S. at a later stage but hasn't given any details yet.
Source: Android Blog
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