The music streaming battle is definitely heating up. While Spotify and Apple Music dominate the market, Google and Amazon are also in the market and they are now trying to capture a bigger pie of the market by using the popularity of their smart speakers. Both Google and Amazon have announced free tier of their premium music service for their voice assistant powered devices.

While Google Home speakers were already capable of playing back music from YouTube Music, it required one to have a paid subscription. Google is now introducing a free tier of YouTube Music for Google Home and other Google Assistant-powered devices.

This means you can go ahead and set YouTube Music as the default music streaming provider and then tell Google Assistant to play songs from it. You will be served ads from time to time and you won’t get a full-fledged experience as well. This means you won’t be able to request songs from a particular artist, album, or genre. All that will require one to subscribe to YouTube Music.

Amazon has also announced that it will start offering an ad-supported version of Amazon Music for its Alexa devices in the United States. This means that even non-Prime members will be able to listen to stream music from Amazon Music on their Alexa-powered smart speaker for free. Like YouTube Music, they won’t get the full experience though and will be limited to top playlists and stations. They won’t be able to ask Alexa to play specific songs or album from Amazon Music.

Our Take

It is clear that this move from Google and Amazon is clearly focused on taking advantage of their voice assistant powered devices to capture a bigger pie of the music streaming market.

Which is your favorite music streaming service? And why? Share with us in the comments!

[Via YouTube

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