Today in my inbox is an email from Google about the new Play music Service apparently called “Google Play Music All Access”. While this is a pretty horrible name for a service.. if you sign up before June 30th your monthly fee will only be $7.99. The price will be going up to $9.99/month after 6/30.
At first glance this isn’t a very impressive price point. Honestly to me its not a very attractive price point at all. I just turned down an offer from SiriusXM for $97.xx/year [for the next year] which works out to be about $8.16/month… But this got me to thinking. This appears to be a mashup of iTunes (recommendations), Google Drive (20,000 song storage), and Last.fm/Pandora (listen to and make your own radio stations), and the best part is No Ads!. It mobile (anywhere that you have wifi or 3G/4G/etc.) You do not have to buy another device or have another “service” enabled device. If they actually have the app buffer dynamically based on data speeds, why would anyone want Satellite radio anymore?
I‘m more than sure that my boss would argue something like “to listen to Howard Stern”, and that is a valid point. There will indeed be some content that is still only available on SiriusXM channelss. So what do you listen to your “radio” for? What content can you not live with out? What price point would make this attractive to you? With already less then half the price of a standard SirisXM account [more if you pay the extra $3.50/mo for the streaming feature] why not save the $10/month?