With the launch of the Galaxy S8, Samsung has announced that it has partnered with Google to make Google Music Play the default music app on the device. This is the start of a long-term partnership, meaning that moving forward all Samsung phones and tablets will have Google Music Play as the default.
There's a lot of competition in the music app market, with Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music and others all trying to win users over. Google has played a strong hand here – not only has it announced this partnership to coincide with the launch of one of the most hotly anticipated smartphones of the year, it has included some pretty enticing extras to sweeten the deal.
Users who've never tried Google Play Music before are eligible for a three-month free trial, giving them access to the 40-million song back catalogue at Google’s disposal. And as Google is YouTube’s parent company, a Google Play Music subscription includes access to YouTube Red, the ad-free version of YouTube.
What’s more, in order to ensure that users can transfer all of their current music collection over, Google is offering double the usual amount of cloud storage, for free – Samsung users will be able to upload 100,000 of their own tracks to Google Play’s cloud storage so that they can enjoy them anywhere.
Bixby integration
According to The Verge, this native integration means that when Samsung’s digital assistant Bixby launches later this year you'll be able to launch Google Music Play directly from Bixby, just by giving it a command to play a track.
This would be an improvement over Google's virtual assistant that's currently on the S8, where if you ask it to play you a track it asks you to select an application to use. Hopefully you'll still be able to choose a different app if you want, otherwise users who don't use Google Play Music will be stuck with Bixby pushing an app on them that they don't want.
Speaking of different choices, if all of this isn’t for you, and you’d rather just have the basic Samsung music app, it is still available, and just needs to be downloaded from the Play Store.
