After the transition of music from CDs and cassettes to digital MP3 files, the next step that came about was online music players. At the very beginning, there were gramophones after which cassettes started ruling the roost and then came CDS. All of these required a player and a bulky one at that. With time, the need to minimize hardware gave way to digital music files generally of the MP3 format. Digital music meant that the file was like software that could be carried in something as small as a pen drive or even on a phone. The phone was the better choice because it is a gadget that stays with a person throughout the day as opposed to a pen drive which is carried only when it is necessary. The next step that is online music players came into being as soon as the Android Operating System started gaining popularity. Also with the exposure to international music, the number of songs also increased a great deal so much so that it was found to be difficult to keep on a phone. That is where online music player started coming in. An online music player is just like any other app that helps users to listen to music, but its advantage is that you don’t necessarily need to download a song and keep it in your phone memory in order to listen to it; only an Internet connection would help you achieve that. Some music players do offer the users the ability to download the file to keep on the phone so that they don’t have to stream it again and again. Google Play Music app is such an online music streaming service that combines the functionality of being a music player as well as being an online music locker.
Read More: [Spotify Music]
The Google Play Music app is a virtual music locker that stores songs for a user. It has some standard accounts that users can opt for. The most standard account allows a user to download and upload up to 50000 songs from their own libraries free of cost. It also has a tie-up with YouTube and offers a service called YouTube Red for 9.99 US Dollars per month so that users can get on-demand streaming of any song in the Google Play Music library. Apart from that users can also purchase music from the Google Play Store. The Google Play Music app also has the ability to store songs for offline listening.
The Google Play Music app is not available for all countries and, therefore, the user must first verify the country that they live in and their credit cards in order to start using the app. Up to 50000 songs can be listened to without any hassle and free of cost for countries that the service is available in. The app is available for most platforms including Android and iOS.
Google play music features:
- Like most apps, Google Play Music is a normal online music streaming website that provides millions of songs to a user.
- This app also has an excellent, free ad-supported radio where you can hear anything you want. The radio stations can be classified and categorized according to your mood, activity, the genre you want to listen to and other such specifications.
- Once you get the Google Play Music app properly installed on your phone and sign it using your Google account, you can get the app across many devices.
- The radio stations that are available here are generally curated by experts, and therefore they have a very low propensity of going wrong with the kind of music that you want to hear.
- Play Music also offers podcasts which you can subscribe to if you really like them.
So how do you set up Google Play Music?
Recently Google released the new update through which users could share their music with a predefined group of family members. Earlier only one user could access and listen to his or her own music but now Google has come up with a family plan so that users in a family can share the music that they are listening to so that nobody has to download one particular song over and over again if it has already been downloaded by someone in the family. Google was always going to release this update because its rival Apple had already offered such a feature a while ago. In fact, the sharing plan in Apple Music was there from 2014 while Google only came around to it in 2016.
So here are the steps how you can get Google Play Music and then activate the family plan to share it with the members of your family.
- First, you have to get the Google Play Music app installed by getting into the Google Play Store and downloading and installing the app. Then you have to provide all the basic information and your credit card information to get the account up and running.
- Now open the app and then move to Family from the Accounts tab and click on the Sign-up button. If you have not done it already, then these are the steps where you need to choose the credit card and provide the information of payment to Google on behalf of everyone in the family. Google has provided a safeguard where an email will reach you as soon as someone in the family purchases something in the app. This is Google’s way of providing security so that people don’t go crazy and start draining bank accounts.
- You can now set up sharing limits so that no inappropriate content is shared with your children. However, if you are a family of all mature adults then you might consider clicking on the share all feature because selecting one content at a time to share with the whole family is a bit tedious. Google does not allow any child accounts so everybody in the family who wants to use the share plan must be 13 years or above. Everybody must also have a Google account and not be listed as a family member anywhere else. All family members also have to live in the same place. There is a big contrast here between Google and Apple where the former doesn’t deliver child account, but the latter does.
So it is all done and ready now. The only thing that is left to do is invite your family members. Invite them and as soon as someone accepts your invitation, you get an email automatically. Also if there is something really important for someone in the family but which is expensive they can also use their own credit cards to buy it instead of draining the family account.
Read More: [MX Player]
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