Google 'All Access' Takes on Spotify

One of the bigger announcements at Google I/O 2013 was Google’s new All Access service. All Access is a subscription-based streaming service being launched initially in the US for $9.99 per month and eventually elsewhere for what will hopefully prove to be comparable prices. The closest pre-existing comparison that one can draw to All Access, and indeed that is being drawn constantly around the web, is with Spotify. In fact, Spotify may be in a bit of trouble here. All Access seems to offer most of the services that Spotify does, except with a few improvements here and there. Admittedly there seem to be a few areas where Spotify holds its ground such as collaborative playlists and the fact that it exists on a desktop as a stand-alone program/app rather than as a browser-based player. All Access also relies on Google+ for its social media side, where Spotify links with the overwhelmingly more-popular Facebook. Still, without having even used All Access it already looks to be a great first-generation music subscription service.

Aesthetics and UI

The All Access UI actually looks great. The default scheme appears to be a white background with an orange theme, backed up by some very contemporary-google-esque borderless rectangular and square images. Clear, sharp angles, dominant images and large text all make for a stylish look that some have compared to Windows Phone 8. Whether or not Google took leads from the once-called Metro UI here isn't important. What is important is that it works. Too often Android apps end up looking very utilitarian, focusing on function rather than form, when there's no reason not to focus on both. With more useful apps that actually distinguish themselves with aesthetic style Android could start appealing to an even greater audience than it already does. There's no hint here that All Access will start any kind of design revolution like this within Android. But it's at least a refreshingly pretty little app that looks easy to navigate.

Explore

Explore is sort of the Start menu and general hub of All Access. Explore is split up in to 4 tabs that can be swiped between horizontally: Recommended is a feed of suggested artists, playlists and custom radio stations all targeted specifically at you, based on the kind of music and artists you’ve been listening to. It’s similar in many respects to the What’s New screen in Spotify, except that it also appears on the smartphone app and includes not just new albums, but suggested playlists, songs and even auto-generates personalized radio stations. Featured is also suggested content like Recommended, but doesn’t look like it boast as much personalization. Currently popular or trending songs, albums and artists are displayed here. It’s kind of like the Recommended section, except content is filtered by popularity. New Releases, as one might expect, is a section dedicated to new music. Once again this is personalized and will favor showing the user new releases by their favorite artists, or from genres that they frequently listen to. Genres is pretty self explanatory. This tab is a list of over-arching genres that scrolls vertically. Once within a genre, the user can flick between the Subgenres, Featured and New Releases tab. As one might expect Featured and New Releases in this instance are just a genre-specific version of the higher-tier basic displays.

Radio Without Rules

Anyone familiar with Spotify, Rdio, Pandora or even Sony Music Unlimited (SMU) will know what kind of radio stations we’re talking about. For those who don’t, modern streaming services often offer the ability to pick an artist, genre, album or song and hit a ‘Start Radio’ button, or something similarly titled. The service then generates a personalized ‘radio station’ on the spot, based on the original track, album, artist or genre that was picked. It’s a great way to find new music that suits your tastes, or even to just get away from your everyday tunes for a taste of something different. Usually users have the option to skip tracks, vote tracks up or down, add tracks to playlists and even skip backwards to played tracks. Where All Access differs is that it gives much greater control than any of the competition in handling these radio stations. Not only can users skip tracks, add tracks to playlists, favorite, dislike and share tracks from All Access radio, they can peak ahead to see what’s coming up and manually adjust the radio. Swiping to the left and holding shows a peak of the next track. But even better, a vertically-scrolling list can be opened from where users can swipe to delete tracks and even tap and hold to rearrange them, so a favorite song spotted down the road can be set as the next track without restarting the whole station. Google calls this “Radio Without Rules”. We call it a great feature that we expect to see picked up by the competition very quickly.

Listen Now

As mentioned in the demo, sometimes you just want to play your music. Listen Now is a screen kind of like Recommended, except it’s generated entirely from your own content. Your most recently listened to tracks, artists, playlists and albums are all there. There are also some pre-generated radio stations based on what you’ve just been listening to. In case anyone was wondering, it is possible to pair your pre-existing music library with All Access. One small foreseeable problem is that this ‘library’ was only mentioned in terms of the Google Music locker. Locker, for the countless folk who have never used or heard of it, was what Google offered before All Access. It’s essentially a cloud-based storage locker where users can store up to 20 000 songs. So that’s a handy feature for people who’ve already used locker, but it’ll be interesting to see if a good-old hard drive full of MP3s can also get some All Access love, or if things need to be a bit more official.

All Access Cost and Availability

Surprisingly, Google didn’t mention a free version of All Access. Most folk were counting on a tiered system like Spotify’s, where users get limited access with ads for free, or more premium services for a paid monthly subscription. All Access looks to be a paid-only affair. The good news is it’s only $10 per month with the first month being free, which is on par or cheaper than most of the competition. The bad is that, while it’s already launched in the US, it’s probably going to take some time to make it overseas. Users who sign up before the end of June this year will also receive the service for a reduced price of $8 per month moving forwards, which is a clever incentive to snatch up those umming and ahing potential customers quickly, as well as getting users from other services to sign up early, just to see if they prefer All Access to whatever they’re currently using. So far All Access looks like it will definitely provide a lot of competition for both Spotify and Microsoft’s Xbox Music. We don’t particularly think Spotify is in too much trouble just yet, as All Access doesn’t seem to have a free option, might be restrictive in what music you can bring to it yourself and is synced with Google+, rather than Facebook. More likely it’s Xbox Music that could take the bigger hit, although All Access could take a while to make it to the Windows Phone market, which would at least secure that user base for Microsoft. At the very least All Access looks like a pretty good music subscription service and should provide some good competition with the current big names.