Apple Music could be working hard to dethrone Spotify, the absolute leader in the streaming music market. However, he also cannot afford to ignore the other horses in the race. Google Play Music today released a major update to its apps for iOS and Android. In it, the learning machine is used to create playlists of related and specific content, thus guaranteeing the user that they will always have new music to listen to, even if they forget to download the music online.
It so happens that this measure is taken on the same day that Amazon Music Unlimited begins its international expansion. Amazon Music Unlimited was launched in the US last month with discounts for premium subscribers. In addition, it has just been publicly announced that the service is already being launched for other international regions, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria, as reported in TechCrunch. At the end of yesterday, Amazon Music Unlimited is already online in the UK, with Germany and Austria.
Despite everything, Google Play Music is, with its new intelligence system, the option that could pose the greatest threat, both for Spotify and its other competitors Apple and Amazon. While Apple Music aims to know your tastes and thus be able to present automatic playlists based on algorithms, Google is upping the ante with music recommendations based on where the user is and what they are doing at the time.
If Google is able to know that you are at the airport, for example, it will recommend music designed to eliminate stress, it will even take into account the weather conditions of that day. As explained from the portal 9to5Google, Specifically, Google Play Music uses machine learning to find out which songs you like and then adds circumstantial factors to the algorithm, such as the location where you are, the activity that is being carried out and the weather that is at those moments (if It rains, if it is hot, if it is cold, if it snows…). This mixes it with manually created playlists to deliver personalized recommendations for users anywhere, anytime.
With a huge focus on context, opting for these new features will deliver "personalized music based on where you are and what you're listening to." This last option includes everything imaginable, from "resting at home, spending hours at work, traveling, flying, exploring new cities, going out in town ... and everything else you can think of."
The application is now also capable of automatically downloading both recent tracks and recommended music to the phone so that, in this way, you always have the music you want to listen to, even if you forget to download manually or don't have it. Internet at that time. These new features have already been released in the iOS app that is available on iTunes.
Already in September, Spotify announced that it had 40 million paying subscribers (reaching a figure higher than 60 million if we count free users), while Apple acknowledged having 17 million at the beginning of the same month. Neither Google Play Music, nor Amazon Music Unlimited have yet announced their subscriber numbers, on the contrary.
It was reported last month that Apple Music was considering a price cut for existing subscribers, either temporarily or permanently, but as subscription rates are set according to the labels, it is unclear how this could be achieved. or how the discount could be applied to users. Spotify, for its part, is not experiencing its best period in recent times, suffering from malware ads in the free version.
