It’s not often that Google incontrovertibly one-ups Apple on anything but search, but the company just scored a small but sizable advantage over Cupertino in at least one regard: music storage space.
Google expanded its Google Play Music service Wednesday to match, store and stream 50,000 tracks, twice what Apple allows iTunes Match paid users. Even better for listeners with large libraries? Google Play Music is free.
Like iTunes Match, Google Play Music allows you to store music in the cloud. Songs have to be uploaded from a computer first, but once they’re up there, they are available for streaming on any device, including the iPhone and iPad, for which there is an official app. Like iTunes Match, Google Play Music also has radio stations.
For anyone who isn’t locked into Apple’s ecosystem, Google Play Music is a heck of a deal. Unlike iTunes Match, which costs $24.99 a year, Google Play Music is free for up to 50,000 songs. Compare that to iTunes Match’s unexpandable 25,000-song limit, and Apple seems pretty stingy.
None of this compares to Amazon’s music-matching service, which allows users to import up to 250,000 songs for $24.99 a year. To my mind, Amazon Music is a lot less polished than either Google Play Music or iTunes Match, but if you have a monster load of tracks you want to keep in the cloud, it’s a strong option.
Google Play Music can be downloaded for free from the link below for iPhone and iPad.
Source: iTunes
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
25 responses to “iTunes Match users: It might be time to switch to Google Play Music”
The Google app also has a lot of issues. I constantly get duplicates, incorrect metadata on the app vs the web. Also in my car, the track info does not always show up via lightning connector. You get what you pay for…..
I don’t agree. It’s great that 50,000 songs is Google’s limit. This is nice for me. It gives me a little breathing room for uploading music. It will also give Apple a chance to match this (no pun intended).
As for having an either/or scenario, I found it very easy to switch between the two despite errors in the Google App they refuse to update.
I don’t know if this is still true, but you can only download the tracks from Google a certain number of times before it locks you out from your own music. iTunes match doesn’t have that restriction.
But maybe I’m old fashioned. I don’t use streaming services, like Rdio or Spotify because it seems like it has a Netflix model where music can be there one day, gone the next. I can’t trust that when I have a large phone that can hold a good chunk of my library, and for those one off songs, I can always just get it on Google’s uploading service here.
Use Google Music for Chrome for unlimited downloads
Is it free? It says try free for 30 days then it cost you 99:- SEK (sweden). Have I missed something?
same in USA, $9.99/month after 30 day trial. Quite a bit more costly than iTunes Match.
Maybe change the facts in the article. 30 days isn’t forever.
Being able to upload music, at least in the US, is free. To get access to their archives of music to stream costs money. But if you upload/match your own songs to their servers, you can stream your own music.
Ok, thank you for clearing that out!
“More space” is a stupid reason to change if that is your ONLY reason.
and free?
Typical anti Apple article without looking into the facts first. Not to mention I won;t trust Google with any part of my iPhone let alone my Mac.
Anti Apple Article on CultofMac? Really?
Cult of Mac anti-Apple?
Which facts did they get wrong?
Why would I move from stuff that works to junkware and malware from the king of spam google.
Yep Exactly. Why would anyone use Google when there’s a better alternative?
iTunes Match, well, it just works!
iTunes Match also gives ad-free iTunes Radio, so there’s some additional value beyond just storing music. Pandora charges $55 /year for ad-free Pandora One radio.
I don’t care about storage, I do care about quality. Apple cloud storage of 25k songs are way more than enough for me, but does Google let you download high quality songs to replace your own crappy version, complete with metadata?
Yup. 320kbps last I checked. But I haven’t had the need in a while since I stream most everything.
320kbps streaming only? Can I download the actual files?
Yes.
Steve Jobs take on this post: You pay for iTunes Match because it’s a product. You don’t pay for Google Play because YOU are the product.
Google’s app doesn’t even have an equalizer. It doesn’t interract with the rest of iOS environment and there’s no Apple TV app. Useless.
Bit late to the conversation here, but I’m surprised no-one has mentioned that unlike with iTunes Match, with Google Play Music you’re literally uploading the files from your computer instead of the service matching songs that it already has in its library and just uploading the rest. (Or have they now implemented this? Not to my knowledge.) Having to upload them takes time, bandwidth (which for some people don’t have a lot of) and from a brief bit of searching has its fair share of issues.
And they still get the album covers wrong :-)