Google Announces Music Service, 900 Million Android Activations

Music-Notes-A2Google has launched the much-anticipated music subscription service through Google Play called All Access, which provides personal recommendations in more than 22 genres. All Access combines a user's personal music list with Google's.

The service also creates personalized radio stations similar to Pandora. The playlist icon allows users to see and delete tracks in the list.

Listen Now in All Access provides music and radio stations created by the app supported on Google TV and the Web, as well as tablets and smartphones. It will become another revenue stream for Google. The service will give everyone a 30-day free trial. Those who sign up before June 30 get a $2 monthly discount from the $9.99 price.

More than 96 million people -- about 30% of the U.S. population -- are expected to stream music from digital devices weekly in the United States this year, according to eMarketer. That's up from 85.4 million, or 27% of the U.S. population, last year.

More than 147 million people in the U.S. listen to Internet radio and streaming music services through applications each month, with about 70 million people in the U.S. expected to listen to music on their phones at least monthly this year. That figure is up from 60.5 million in 2012, according to the analyst firm.

Aside from All Access, Google also announced updates to the Google Play developer platform, such as Optimization Tips, App Translation Service, Usage Metrics & Referral Tracking, Revenue Graphs, and Beta Testing & Staged Rollouts.

Google Cloud Messenger is now part of Google Play services. The company delivers 17 billion push messages daily, or 200,000 GCM push messages per second. GCM first arrived for Android last year. Android -- activated on more than 900 million devices, or 48 billion apps downloads -- augments Google's paid-search engine advertising and other services, including maps and analytics. Google counts about 2.5 billion Android app installations per month.

There are now three location-related APIs for the Android platform: Fused Location Provider, Geofencing and Activity Recognition. Fused Location Provider takes advantage of an Android device's extra sensors to quickly determine the phone's location, whereas geofencing gives app developers a method to define up to 100 fences around areas to trigger specific actions when the device enters or leaves the area.

1 comment about "Google Announces Music Service, 900 Million Android Activations".
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  1. Peter Benjamin from MyOffices, May 16, 2013 at 10:01 p.m.

    Its just aolmusic all over again. It won't work. It should have started at $3 per month then gradually grow over a few years like iTunes. Real tried it and failed and AOLMusic is a dead dog. The Pandora model works. They should have stuck to the Google free nationwide Internet first. Tvonthego.com

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