Google Offers Free 4-Month Play Music Trial Subscription to Celebrate July 4th

[Ves]

I think most people will bump into ta problem as after almost 2 years a lot of already tried Play Music at least once, so this might not work for them as it's focused on new subscribers.
Their biggest selling point is the ability to upload 50,000 songs of your own without having a subscription.

It's good to see different services being offered and not one service hording them all but be better Play Music will need to fixing the issues that keep getting mentioned.

 

[8692574]

Boo... US only

Well the 4th of July is a holiday in US only.... what do you expect?

 

[MH01]

Hi
last week the brilliant Googe Play Music was £1.00 for 90 days.
https://play.google.com/store/music
hope it is still available.

Thank you. Its still available
[doublepost=1467614702][/doublepost]

Well the 4th of July is a holiday in US only.... what do you expect?

Happy 4th July! Even though I'm not from the US

 

[IeU]

Any way around the US-only block?

 

[MH01]

Any way around the US-only block?

If you can get a us credit card, you can change regions.

 

[deany]

Any way around the US-only block?

If you are UK based the £1.00 for 90 days offer is here: https://play.google.com/store/music

 

[69Mustang]

Stop being pedantic, as if you don't know the differences. Apple and Google collect a lot of the same basic information (Google Play vs The App Store for purchases, Google Music vs Apple Music for your tastes, Google Now vs Siri for requests you make, location information from your iPhone or Android phone and many others), with a few important differences:

We agree, they both collect a lot of the same basic information, and I'm not pedantic at all. Just factual. I'll list nothing but facts that I can prove.

- Google gets data from millions of websites. For example, if I go to Company ABC and browse their website, and then visit another unrelated website, I'll often be served a targeted ad for Company ABC (since they knew I visited their site). Or I'll be served a targeted ad for another product similar to what Company ABC sells. They know this because Company ABC will have embedded code from Google in their website.

I'm not sure if you realize this or not but Apple does the exact same thing. Not something similar, but the exact same thing. You can opt out of both. Opting out of either one still doesn't negate all targeted ads because: If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. <-- Guess where I pulled that info from? Also opting out only applies to Apple's and Googles respective ad services and does not affect targeted ads from other ad networks.

Apples primary reason for collecting data is for security and to improve the customer experience. Googles primary reason for collecting data is to power targeted advertising, which is almost 90% of their revenue. Any company that relies so heavily on only a single product (advertising) will never have the same concerns about your privacy, regardless of what they try to tell you.

How did you come to the conclusion about Apple's reasoning for data collection? Was it because of this:

We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:

• We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.
• • We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, and iTunes Store and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non‑personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy. Aggregated data... where have I heard that term before? Oh yeah, Google.
  • Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use“cookies” and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches.
  • Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
  • As is true of most internet services, we gather some information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, browser type and language, Internet service provider (ISP), referring and exit websites and applications, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.
    
    We use this information to understand and analyze trends, to administer the site, to learn about user behavior on the site, to improve our product and services, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. Apple may use this information in our marketing and advertising services.

For example, Apple is implementing differential privacy (announced at WWDC). Google is also doing this with RAPPOR. However, Google is more of an experiment whereas Apple is rolling out full-blown deployment. There's a lot of discussion of whether differential privacy can even be used for something like targeted advertising, as the whole purpose of targeted advertising is having a detailed profile about an individual (can't serve me ads for Miller Lite or Budweiser when I'm a beer fanatic who only drinks craft beers - so simply knowing I like beer is not specific enough to target me). You can bet Google will never introduce any privacy enhancing features that could affect their core business (targeted advertising).

Google has been using RAPPOR for over a year now. Full blown roll out of DP for Apple? When did that news come out?
There's also a question of whether Apple's future use of DP will be effective for them. They are studying it intently. Which is why a full blown deployment is not eminent.

So, yeah, not even close.

Apparently, closer than you think at least. All of that info comes from Apple's privacy policy. You say they collect for security and improvements. I'll agree on the improvements, but security is a stretch for me since the policy mentions advertising, customer behavior, tracking cookies, and a host of "Google-like" things far more than any mention of security. To be fair, maybe you think the security is implied instead of being laid out legally.

 

[MH01]

Stop being pedantic, as if you don't know the differences. Apple and Google collect a lot of the same basic information (Google Play vs The App Store for purchases, Google Music vs Apple Music for your tastes, Google Now vs Siri for requests you make, location information from your iPhone or Android phone and many others), with a few important differences:

- Google has the worlds number one search engine, which is a literal gold mine of data about you.
- Google gets data from millions of websites. For example, if I go to Company ABC and browse their website, and then visit another unrelated website, I'll often be served a targeted ad for Company ABC (since they knew I visited their site). Or I'll be served a targeted ad for another product similar to what Company ABC sells. They know this because Company ABC will have embedded code from Google in their website.
- Google makes $50 billion a year monetizing your data for targeted advertising. Advertising that would be practically useless without a search engine to power it or tracking code built into websites.
- Google Wallet used to track all your purchasing transactions (don't know if they still do).

Apples primary reason for collecting data is for security and to improve the customer experience. Googles primary reason for collecting data is to power targeted advertising, which is almost 90% of their revenue. Any company that relies so heavily on only a single product (advertising) will never have the same concerns about your privacy, regardless of what they try to tell you.

For example, Apple is implementing differential privacy (announced at WWDC). Google is also doing this with RAPPOR. However, Google is more of an experiment whereas Apple is rolling out full-blown deployment. There's a lot of discussion of whether differential privacy can even be used for something like targeted advertising, as the whole purpose of targeted advertising is having a detailed profile about an individual (can't serve me ads for Miller Lite or Budweiser when I'm a beer fanatic who only drinks craft beers - so simply knowing I like beer is not specific enough to target me). You can bet Google will never introduce any privacy enhancing features that could affect their core business (targeted advertising).


So, yeah, not even close.

That's not how it works.

You will only be tracked by Google if

1. You click on a search result when using google search
2. The site you visit has google analytics installed
3. The site runs google ads

Remove 2 and 3 and you are lost to google once you visit the site.

Hence when you come to macrumors you get ads following you as it runs double click for its revenue.

 

[aloshka]

Fair enough. I DO use YouTube. Although its actually increasingly rare these days. Its almost always embedded in an article I'm reading or shared on social media. I never go out of my way to watch videos on YouTube. And not out of principle, simply because that's not how I choose to ingest content. When I'm watching video its usually on one of the streaming services I pay for.

And to be fair: I am stoked to have ad-free YouTube for a few months as part of this trial. I don't use it very often, but when I do it'll be nice to not have to skip ads. I just don't know that I would pay for it in 4 months time. We'll see if they hook me.

Even though there aren't ads, the tracking is still there for youtube embedded. But that doesn't matter since web tracking is worse imo. The other thing about youtube red is offline and play in the background youtube. A lot of indie stuff I like is not even on Apple Music and sometimes not even on google play music (although one feature of google play is you can do youtube videos that show up as music). Not sure if you use that, but a feature to look at for sure.

Btw, thanks for having a normal conversation. That's a pretty big change from the normal posts here at MR. It's good to see what other people think of GPM.

 

[8692574]

Happy 4th July! Even though I'm not from the US

Well neither am I but thanks, i'll try to make it happy anyway

 

[Bawstun]

What?
[doublepost=1467606216][/doublepost]

Wish I could disagree with you, but I can't. But the irony of it all is that the reason Google is so good at predicting these kinds of things is because they harvested so much information. But just using Apple products doesn't make you immune. Google has an amazing tracking network, so whether you use google to search or not, you're still tracked because the websites you use most likely use GA. It's easy to identify you, even using Safari, so all your browsing habits are recorded. To me that's worse than telling google what i like or don't like.

One thing to do, is make sure you set up "save cookies only from the sites I visit" to at least kind of control how much sites can harvest off you, since all these tracking cookies come from domains other than what you are visiting.

Sigh, but you are absolutely right and that's why I'm so torn between apple & google. I hate google for what they do, but that's what makes them so intelligent in searches, music, etc. I think if there are better ways to make yourself immune from it, I'd deal with the imperfection of Apple services. But as it stands, even apple can't protect us, and doesn't matter whether you use google services or not. I think we need laws set up by congress that will require optins for this type of data collection. I've wrote to senators, etc, but doesn't make a diff.

What do you mean, what? Those glaring red bubbles. All of it. It's absolutely horrendous and embarrassing - so bad.
[doublepost=1467617604][/doublepost]

Bull. Google and Apple are light years apart in this regard, both in terms of the amount of data they collect and how it's used.

That's literally just what I said. It doesn't change the fact that they both, however, now have our information. Just because we hold more trust in Apple not to sell our data for profit, doesn't negate the fact that we've given it up. Privacy does not exist.

 

[8692574]

Privacy does not exist.

We lost our privacy from the very first time we mentioned it......There's no such thing as privacy nowadays!

The world was more "private" when we did not have all this privacy laws and such.

 

[MH01]

What?
[doublepost=1467606216][/doublepost]

Wish I could disagree with you, but I can't. But the irony of it all is that the reason Google is so good at predicting these kinds of things is because they harvested so much information. But just using Apple products doesn't make you immune. Google has an amazing tracking network, so whether you use google to search or not, you're still tracked because the websites you use most likely use GA. It's easy to identify you, even using Safari, so all your browsing habits are recorded. To me that's worse than telling google what i like or don't like.

One thing to do, is make sure you set up "save cookies only from the sites I visit" to at least kind of control how much sites can harvest off you, since all these tracking cookies come from domains other than what you are visiting.

Sigh, but you are absolutely right and that's why I'm so torn between apple & google. I hate google for what they do, but that's what makes them so intelligent in searches, music, etc. I think if there are better ways to make yourself immune from it, I'd deal with the imperfection of Apple services. But as it stands, even apple can't protect us, and doesn't matter whether you use google services or not. I think we need laws set up by congress that will require optins for this type of data collection. I've wrote to senators, etc, but doesn't make a diff.

Apple protect us? No no no... Apple collects far more identifiable information than google.

Let me explain. I use an anonymous proxy for my internet surfing, I fall off the grid for Google, in relation to google analytics and ads tracking, not that it matters cause Google tracking you via GA or Ads does not indentify you as "aloshka".

Now Apple: every single Apple device now, I have to login using my Apple ID, be it an idevice or laptop .... Any device... Cause one way or another they have forced Appleid on us, which is YOU, all your personal information , Down to date of birth and street address . Apple know everything you download, search within iTunes, appstore, how much you spend , what Apple devices you purchase , they have a profile so impressive on you that Google could only dream.

Apple does not need to know what you "Google" ..... To work out where you live, how much you spent, what your interests are etc....you are happily signing into thier devices and providing this info.

The difference . I can protect myself from Google tracking me , I cannot stop Apple.

And on a finishing note, Siri is not there to make life easier for you, it captures for Apple what it's users search for . Apple is not protector or champion , it's a player !

 

[JackieInCo]

I might try this once again. I just went up to the payment part and it is forgetting that I once tried Google Play Music a few years ago. I didn't like it enough to keep paying for it. I've always liked Apple music and I have it on my iPhones and Android phones today. I've always preferred Apples music app over Googles and to me, that was the only difference between the two music services.

As far as ads go in YouTube, I've been blocking them since they started whenever it was.
[doublepost=1467621050][/doublepost]

That's not how it works.

You will only be tracked by Google if

1. You click on a search result when using google search
2. The site you visit has google analytics installed
3. The site runs google ads

Remove 2 and 3 and you are lost to google once you visit the site.

Hence when you come to macrumors you get ads following you as it runs double click for its revenue.

Or you simply block ads in apps and in any browser and you are also free.

 

[MH01]

I might try this once again. I just went up to the payment part and it is forgetting that I once tried Google Play Music a few years ago. I didn't like it enough to keep paying for it. I've always liked Apple music and I have it on my iPhones and Android phones today. I've always preferred Apples music app over Googles and to me, that was the only difference between the two music services.

As far as ads go in YouTube, I've been blocking them since they started whenever it was.
[doublepost=1467621050][/doublepost]
Or you simply block ads in apps and in any browser and you are also free.

Nope. While you have a valid ip, you will be tracked via google analytics and any searches you perform. Even GA will tell you how many people are using adblockers.

 

[Benjamin Frost]

I've tried all 3 major streaming services and I love Apple Music and Google Play Music the most. However, I don't like the interface for GPM because it requires a slide over and click just to get to My Library. It should automatically load me to it. I know, small complaint but still. Apple Music has a decent interface but it does have some pretty "meh" recommendations and it is kind of cluttered.

Also, I think I'm done with streaming altogether after a year of streaming and not buying music. I like to own my own music and have it available to have forever. After paying $10 per month for a year ($120) I could have purchased all the music I discovered and saved for offline listening for far less than that. It sucks because after being subbed to Apple Music and then unsubscribing when I switched to GPM, I didn't have access to my music (obviously) and it took me a long time to put my library back together.

In the end, I'd rather pay for my music and own it rather than pay and rent my music.

This is it.

In a year, you've spent $120 on streaming and own nothing. Just think: you could have bought 120 songs for that to own forever! That's far more than most people would ever want to buy over several years. I only buy a handful of tracks a year; maybe two or three plus the odd album. When an album typically costs about $5 on Amazon, it is pointless to pay to rent music on any streaming service. If you really want to hear something before buying, just go to YouTube, free Spotify or listen to free radio. But paying $1,200 every ten years (which will no doubt increase) is throwing money away.

I find it amazing that even 15 million have been gullible enough to pay for glorified radio. Even then, that's just 1.5% of Apple's installed base. When you add Android users, that's about 0.5% of the available audience. That's not a percentage that Steve Jobs would have deemed acceptable, I think. His target for the iPhone's first year was 1%, which grew each year to reach 15% or so now. The iPod stabilised at about 66%. I can't imagine that Apple are making any meaningful profit on Apple Music, Apple Pay or the Apple Watch, and I don't think they ever will.

 

[8692574]

This is it.

In a year, you've spent $120 on streaming and own nothing. Just think: you could have bought 120 songs for that to own forever! That's far more than most people would ever want to buy over several years. I only buy a handful of tracks a year; maybe two or three plus the odd album. When an album typically costs about $5 on Amazon, it is pointless to pay to rent music on any streaming service. If you really want to hear something before buying, just go to YouTube, free Spotify or listen to free radio. But paying $1,200 every ten years (which will no doubt increase) is throwing money away.

I find it amazing that even 15 million have been gullible enough to pay for glorified radio. Even then, that's just 1.5% of Apple's installed base. When you add Android users, that's about 0.5% of the available audience. That's not a percentage that Steve Jobs would have deemed acceptable, I think. His target for the he first year was 1%, which grew each year to reach 15% or so now. The iPod stabilised at about 66%. I can't imagine that Apple are making any meaningful profit on Apple Music, Apple Pay or the Apple Watch, and I don't think they ever will.

15 Millions times 11.50 (let's average between the solo and family) it is around 172.500.000 (a MONTH!!!!) ... Stevo Jobs would be happy about it for a first year product, as you suggest people that leave have NOTHING hence tying them down in the long run...

A 2 Billion first year product is not bad!

 

[John Mcgregor]

This is it.

In a year, you've spent $120 on streaming and own nothing. Just think: you could have bought 120 songs for that to own forever! That's far more than most people would ever want to buy over several years. I only buy a handful of tracks a year; maybe two or three plus the odd album. When an album typically costs about $5 on Amazon, it is pointless to pay to rent music on any streaming service. If you really want to hear something before buying, just go to YouTube, free Spotify or listen to free radio. But paying $1,200 every ten years (which will no doubt increase) is throwing money away.

I find it amazing that even 15 million have been gullible enough to pay for glorified radio. Even then, that's just 1.5% of Apple's installed base. When you add Android users, that's about 0.5% of the available audience. That's not a percentage that Steve Jobs would have deemed acceptable, I think. His target for the he first year was 1%, which grew each year to reach 15% or so now. The iPod stabilised at about 66%. I can't imagine that Apple are making any meaningful profit on Apple Music, Apple Pay or the Apple Watch, and I don't think they ever will.

There are plenty of sales on iTunes and you can get albums for 4.99 or so. That's what i do and it's DRM free and mine forever.
[doublepost=1467628093][/doublepost]

15 Millions times 11.50 (let's average between the solo and family) it is around 172.500.000 (a MONTH!!!!) ... Stevo Jobs would be happy about it for a first year product, as you suggest people that leave have NOTHING hence tying them down in the long run...

A 2 Billion first year product is not bad!

And what's the profit from that? Nobody knows.

 

[8692574]

And what's the profit from that? Nobody knows.

The same applies to your reasoning... IF we don't know we cannot judge if it is a good investment or a bad one.

The fact that you don't like it / use it does not make it automatically a bad business decision for the company!

 

[John Mcgregor]

The same applies to your reasoning... IF we don't know we cannot judge if it is a good investment or a bad one.

The fact that you don't like it / use it does not make it automatically a bad business decision for the company!

Yes, but we know a lot to make very accurate guess. And it's not much by my calculations.

 

[Textime]

Am I the only one who thinks that iTunes Match is the best music service ever created?

 

[8692574]

Yes, but we know a lot to make very accurate guess. And it's not much by my calculations.

Spotify pays about 70% of revenues to music rights holders, and we assume that Apple’s cost structure would be similar.... so 30% of 2 billions still equal to 600.000.000 or more than half a billion... and even if it was 20% still it is a wopping 400.000.000.....again not bad for a first year.

Wish i could make that kind of money selling "air".

 

[John Mcgregor]

We know Spotify has a 70% - 30% ratio... so 30% of 2 billions still equal to 600.000.000 or more than half a billion...

We also know Spotify has no clue what profit is, since they haven;t had any yet. Add that to the mix.

 

[8692574]

We also know Spotify has no clue what profit is, since they haven;t had any yet. Add that to the mix.

How Spotify manage that 30% is not up to Apple, and not making profit does not means not making money...usually you reinvest in the company and such... but let's get back on topic!

 

[John Mcgregor]

How Spotify manage that 30% is not up to Apple, and not making profit does not means not making money...usually you reinvest in the company and such... but let's get back on topic!

It will be 8 years this October since Spotify launched. The problem is not reinvestment, the problem is the business is unsustainable at these price points.