I’ve been thinking about joining one of these services for a while now and an announcement made this week that Google Play Music service “will now let users upload up to 50,000 personal songs” prompted me to ask the question – so how does this service compare with other offerings and is there any catch if i want to get this for “free”? Any user experiences or recommendations appreciated?

The uploading your own music service really doesn’t compare to any streaming services like Spotify etc. It’s just a cloud service for music, I’ve no idea how it integrates with the streaming service if you do decide to pay, but beyond what you upload there’s no streaming for free. There’s no Google equivalent to Spotify’s free service with ads as far as I’m aware.

All I’m really after is a cloud storage app that I can have on various devices (Android/iPad), with the ability to stream my own music. I haven’t gone into it in any detail either (currently at work!) but hopefully you can configure song choice and genre, etc.

I use Google Play music and have uploaded loads of to it, I can choose which allbums sit on a device and which ones I want just in the cloud and its simple to buy whole albums if you want. I like the android interface to, its much better than the previous Sony interface I was using.

Yep I use it in exactly the same way, yet to find much in the way of functionality I would like to have and don’t. You can choose by artist, album, genre and shuffle within any of those headings. You can also have your favourite music on device, but allow it to cache a random sample of the rest of your music whenever you’re on wifi so that you get more variety when you shuffle all songs.

Thanks for the replies. I’ll explore a little more over the weekend…

been using google play for a year or 2. I like that i have all my mp3 music on all my devices without having to copy over.

i also pay for the streaming which is bloody marvellous and i now spend more time listening to music than TV watching. which is great.

i also let my daughter and wife log in. we sometimes get into a who`s listening fight (it only lets one device per account stream music that you dont own) but being the bill payer i pull rank.

I use Google Play as effectively a backup to my ‘on premise’ iTunes library, can be handy from time to time – less so since I got a 128Gb phone which it all fits on anyway with ooples of space left.