Matching Amazon’s new free music offer on Echo speakers, Google now offers owners of the Google Home speaker access to free tunes, via YouTube Music.
There’s a big difference: songs are sponsored on Amazon Echo speakers, while tunes for Google users are free.
Additionally, they can be listened on both the Google Home speaker line, and any speaker that has the Google Assistant, Google’s Siri/Alexa like helper. That includes the brands Sony, JBL, Harman and others.
What you can’t get is on-demand song selection, but instead playlists or radio stations created based on your requests. On-demand fans will need to upgrade to YouTube Music Premium, which costs $9.99 monthly.
To access the free songs, Google Home owners will need to set YouTube Music as the default music service. (Which means knocking out Spotify, if that’s your choice.) This is done in account settings.
But for the free music, in a company blog, Google suggests asking for “Latin vibes,” or music for a home workout. “With YouTube Music and Google Home, you can ask Google Home to play the right music for any moment or mood, and YouTube Music will play the perfect station, customized to your tastes based upon your request.”
On Echo speakers, Amazon initially only offered music to members of the $119 yearly Prime service, which offers expedited shipping and entertainment, but this week opened it to anyone who owned an Echo.
Prime members still get 2 million songs ad-free. A bigger selection of 50 million songs is available from Amazon Music Unlimited for $9.99 monthly, or $7.99 monthly for Prime members.
Spotify has nearly 100 million subscribers globally to 56 million from No. 2 Apple Music. Apple offers free trials of its service but doesn’t offer a free tier for listening to music with ads, beyond genre radio stations.
Amazon has said it has 100 million subscribers to the Prime service.
