Google Now Offers Free Ad Supported Version of Google Play Music

The streaming music wars have certainly heated up lately and with Apple jumping into the game we are seeing some of our traditional favorites scrambling to create more enticing offers in hopes to keep their edge and keep some of their users from defecting to Apple's new offering. Today Google has announced that they will be upping the ante on their end with a new free version of Google Play Music.

Billed as 'music for everything you do", this new ad supported version of Google Play Music will work much like most of your favorite streaming services out there. The service will utilize Radio stations that are curated by music experts — including staffers from Songza — giving you the option to browse stations by genre, mood, decade or activity or by artist, song or album.You’ll also get ad-free, offline and background features for music videos on YouTube. And with or without a subscription, you can store and play up to 50,000 songs from your own collection for free.

Google says the ad-supported version is intended to help expose consumers to its service, with the goal of converting users to the paid version so they can access content offline, create their own playlists and, of course, stream music without interruption. The upgraded version runs at $9.99 a month. For the cost of the paid subscription users will have access to other features such as skipping ads, listening to music offline, creating playlists and perusing the library of 30 million songs. Subscribers also get early access to YouTube's subscription service.

The new free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music is launching first in the U.S. It’s available on the web today, and is rolling out this week to Android and iOS.