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That's a long name. It's actually a music subscription service available in the US that's part of Google Play Music.

"Google Play Music All Access is a new monthly music subscription service that lets you listen to millions of songs across your devices. You can create a radio station from any song or artist you love, browse recommendations from our expert music team or explore by genre. (...) It's $9.99 a month, and you can try it free for the first month. Or better yet, start your trial by June 30 and you'll pay only $7.99 a month."


Instead of buying music, you can listen to the entire Google Play catalog. It's not free like Pandora, but you can listen to any song you like, as long as it's available.

Google Music now has a trash page that includes all the songs you've deleted. You can find the page by clicking the "options" icon and selecting "Music trash" from the menu. The songs are permanently deleted after 28 days (why not 30 days like in Gmail?), but you can also manually do that. There's also an "undelete" button for restoring music files.



It's interesting to notice that the deleted music files are no longer synced with Google Music Manager. As Google explains, "once you permanently delete [a song], the content and related data (e.g., stored play counts) will be disassociated from your account. There may be some delay before our systems fully process your removal request. In addition, if this content was purchased from Google Play, the only way to retrieve it is to repurchase the content."

If you're looking for more features for Google Music, try the new Labs page. Google informs that "Google Play music labs are a testing ground for experimental features that aren't quite ready for primetime. They may change, break, or disappear at any time."

Right now, there are three experimental features available: desktop notifications for Chrome, HTML5 audio and 5-star ratings. If you enable 5-star ratings, thumbs ups and thumbs downs will be converted to 5 stars and 1 star. HTML5 audio "works in all browsers that support MP3 playback with HTML5 audio: Chrome, Safari 3.1+, and IE 9+" and replaces the hidden Flash player that's currently used.


After enabling desktop notifications, you should see an infobar that asks for permission. Click "allow" and Google Music will show a nice notification enhanced with a cover art thumbnail when a new song starts playing.



{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Google Music's source code includes a few references to some new features. There's a Music Labs page that will probably include new ways to organize and visualize your songs. "Google Play music player labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren't quite ready for primetime. They may change, break, or disappear at any time." For now, this section is empty.


Right now, you can only upload songs using the Music Manager software, but that may change in the future. There's a new page for uploading music.


Another new section called "history" could show a list of songs you've recently played.


Google Music could also add a roulette view and some charts for visualizing how often you play certain songs.


{ Thanks, Florian K. }

If you frequently watch music videos or listen to music on YouTube and you also use Last.fm, there's a Chrome extension that scrobbles these songs. The official Last.fm client supports players like iTunes and Windows Media Player, but YouTube is probably the largest online repository of free music and it can be used as a music player.

The Last.fm Scrobbler for Chrome detects the category of the video you're watching and tries to find the artist and the song title, then it sends this information to Last.fm. The first time when it scrobbles a song you'll see a Last.fm page that requests your permission.

The extension shows notifications when the track changes and it supports many other sites: Google Music, Pandora, MySpace, Google+ (the YouTube widget) and more. At the moment, you can't scrobble tracks in Google Music because Google changed the URL, but an update should fix this issue.


{ via Matthew }

Google announced the launch of a new service called Google Play, "a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps". Google Play is the new name for the Android Market, an all-encompassing brand that also integrates Google Music and Google eBook Store. It's just like iTunes, except that it's born on the Web and you don't need special software to play music or read books.


"Our goal with Google Play is to bring together all your favorite content in one place that you can access across your devices. Specifically, digital content is fundamental to the mobile experience, so bringing all of this content together in one place for users makes the Android platform even more compelling. We're also simplifying digital content for Google users - you can go to the Google Play website on your desktop and purchase and experience the latest movies, music and books," explains Google.

The Android Market app will have a new name (Google Play Store) and this may confuse a lot of people. After all, Android Market is one of the few apps that are bundled with most Android devices. Google Play brings the same features that were available in Android Market and it's still targeted to the Android users, but the new brand no longer includes "Android". This allows Google to create a single destination for multiple platforms: iOS, Windows Phone, Google TV, Chrome / Chrome OS.


"On your Android phone or tablet, we'll be upgrading the Android Market app to the Google Play Store app over the coming days. Your videos, books and music apps (in countries where they are available) will also be upgraded to Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music apps," informs the Google Blog.



Google Play Music is only available in the US, Google Play Movies is available in the US, UK, Canada, and Japan, while Google Play Books only works in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. That means most Google Play users will only be able to install Android apps.


Google Play is a catchy name, it's platform-agnostic, flexible and could encourage more people to buy music and books even if they don't have an Android device. Android users will have to get used to the new name and the new visual identity.



{ Thanks, Andrew. }

Google Music is out of beta and users can now buy songs, but only in the US. Business Insider reports that the store has 13 million songs from 3 major labels (EMI, Universal, Sony) and other independent labels, self-released artists can upload their own songs and T-Mobile customers can pay for songs on their phone bills.

Google Music Store is available in the Android Market (both the web interface and a new version of the mobile app that will be released soon). A surprising feature is the integration with Google+: "if you use Google+ to share a song or album with someone either privately or through a circle, the person who receives the share will get one free full play of the song or album. If you do a Public share, people in your circles will get one free full play of the shared song or album. Everyone else who sees the share will get a preview."

Google offers a lot of exclusive songs and albums, but you can't download the free songs from the store without associating a US credit card to Google Checkout.



Google Music will store the songs you've uploaded or bought and now you can also download them. For example, in the web interface, click the arrow icon next to a song and select "Save to computer". The catch is that "you can only download each purchased track from the web 2 times". To download all the songs you've purchased from Google Music, use the Music Manager app.


"Google Music is about discovering, purchasing, sharing and enjoying digital music in new, innovative and personalized ways. Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library — both purchases and uploads — across all your devices so you don't have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space," informs the Google blog.

The latest Dev Channel release of Google Chrome for Chromebooks added two icons to the new tab page. They're similar to the Chrome Web Store icon, but they're for games and music. At the moment, the new icons don't send users to some special pages, but it's likely that they'll be used to promote the games section from the Chrome Web Store and an updated Google Music.


As AllThingsD reports, "Google is finally close to launching a music service with help from the labels". The news was confirmed by Andy Rubin, Google's Senior Vice President of Mobile. "Google is in the very, very early phases of adding consumer products to our portfolio. The media industry didn't see us as that. They saw us a search company," Andy Rubin said, trying to explain why it takes so long to launch a music store and other similar services. At the moment, Google Music is an invite-only service that lets you upload up to 20,000 songs and stream them to any computer, iOS or Android device.

{ Thanks, Sean. }