Play Music All Access from Google

Google is now officially in competition with other streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora. For $10 per month, users can sign up for this latest subscription model service with availability to “millions of songs”, according to Chris Yerga, Director of Android Engineering. The new service was announced at Google’s I/O Developer Conference today.

All Access will deliver music selections in playlist that have been generated automatically based on a users preferences. The catalog of songs is promised to be very large and announcements of deals with Sony, Universal were made as well.

It is another data point in the drift away from downloaded media. The streaming model promises to disrupt the traditional iTunes model. We’ll have to wait and see what the technical specifications are. However, current streaming services offer less quality than traditional 128 kbps MP3 files. Disappointing.