How lucky we are to have Google Play Music

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Screen shot from my Google Play Music app

This article is going to show my age here. I’m 36 years old, I could be 37, but who’s counting. I was born in 1975, you do the math. 

I was just thinking about my Dad who passed away just 6 years ago and was wondering what he would think of all this technology that is flying at us faster than Jimi Hendrix’s fingers moving on a guitar (okay…  That’s impossible). 

I remember being a little kid flipping through my Dad’s vynils that he kept in an OCD order with his intials written on every cover. All of his Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Beatles and so on were all stacked neatly on milk crates in our living room.  When he wanted to make the windows rattle and my bed slowly vibrate across my room he would a play a Jimi Hendrix album and crank them Kenwoods (Purple Haze was always fun to wake up to). When the Yankee game was on and he and I we’re chilling it was generally the Beatles. I want to vomit when I think of what he and my mom were doing when Otis Redding was playing.  I remember him looking at them album covers and being fascinated (enough to initial every album he owned) and studying the front and back of whichever album he was playing and reading the little book that came with most vynils. He skipped over the whole cassette era and went straight from Vynil to CD. When I was in my teens I stopped by to see him and noticed he had made the switch from vynil to CDs.  I asked him, “what gives?”.  I remember him telling me that these were the future and that he could never imagine the digital remastered sound that these CDs created being topped. Boy was he wrong.

Let’s fast forward 20 years to this morning when I got in my truck to go to the store and grab a Red Bull and a pack of smokes. I was thinking about my dad and his love of music so I mounted my Android phone, went to Google Play Music and looked up Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsy’s. Low and behold there it was front and center on my 5″ Droid DNA (running an HTC One Sense 5 ROM port BTW).  I hope you were lucky enough to get the monthly subscription to Google Play Music for $7.99 a month because its worth every penny.

On the ride to the store with my ear drums bleeding to Machine Gun on one of the greatest live albums ever, I was wondering what my dad would think of the state of music and how easily we can have access to pretty much any album or song available. I know he wouldn’t dig any of the top 40 shit that’s playing on the radio, but how would he feel about hitting a few buttons on a piece of glass to get to his favorite album or song. He was a hip guy that stayed with the times but this particular question left me scratching my head. There are no more covers to study, or lyrics to read or cool little books with John, Paul, George and Ringo with dialated eyes looking cool as hell.

I’m going to bring this to a conclusion here by saying I’m a huge fan of Google Play Music and everything it has to offer and I’m sure he would be to. If you don’t want to pay the monthly subscription, you can do one of two things. Buy a 64 gig SD card and load that sucker up with thousands of your favorite tunes, or you can use Google Play Music Manager and upload up to 50,000 songs for FREE on to their server and stream it all day long (if you have unlimited data or access to WiFi often).  If you don’t want to stream it, hit that little pin by the album and download it straight to your device.

My Dad and I are a lot a like in many ways and I’m going out on a limb to say he would feel the same way about Google Play Music as I do. Hell, if he wanted to see the cover, read the lyrics or see that cool psychedelic book inside there is always Google Now.

David Quillinan

About David Quillinan

Dave is the owner and founder of Android Fan Network, has a special place in his heart for Google Play Edition devices, and stock Android. When he's not writing for AFN, you can find him at www.CellTraderOnline.com lurking the forums.

  • KentuckyHouse

    I was a Rhapsody subscriber, but jumped at the $7.99 deal when Google Play Music All-Access was announced. Within a month, I cancelled the Google Play Music All-Access and went back to Rhapsody. Why? Because in my experience, GPM used an extraordinary amount of data to stream as opposed to Rhapsody. I’m not talking a few hundred meg more than Rhapsody…I’m talking a couple of gig in just a few hours of using it (whereas I rarely used over a gig on Rhapsody in an entire month). I’m not sure if the music streamed from GPM is of higher quality than Rhapsody, thus the higher data usage, but what I do know is if I’d continued to use GPM I’d have eaten through my 5gb allotment of data in just a few days (I’m still a grandfathered unlimited data user on AT&T).

    • Dave12118

      It is a data chewer at times, but the music selection (at least my taste in music) is packed with great albums and artists. I still hit Pandora occasionally, but when I’m looking for a specific artist or album it GPM all the way. And yeah… I have 16 gigs to share with 3 other lines. FML.