Google Home Now Supports Purchased Music Listening

Google Home now supports Google Play Music for purchased music. This might surprise you that Google Home included Google Play Music integration, but only for on demand listening and not for purchased music. The full service integration was just announced late yesterday in a blog post.

On top of the subscription or free radio service, you can listen to music you’ve uploaded to and purchased on Google Play Music.

The service will still default to on demand or subscription music unless you specifically ask it to play from your library. The post makes this point:

Subscription on demand content will play before your purchased/uploaded content unless you ask to play it from your library using “Play X <from my library>.”, “Play my X”, etc.

Music Listening is a Top Use Case

Several studies show that music listening is one of the top three use cases and access to multiple streaming services was indicated as important to users in a survey by Morning Consult.

However, no one really asks about access to purchased / owned music. Google Home and Amazon Alexa natively enable streaming audio. This is true when you ask the devices for the weather, a game, audio book or music. It is easy to make an https stream accessible to users. Define your intents, paste your secure URL and it is ready for use. Content in other formats provides another challenge. Kudos to Google for figuring this out.

It may be that all content will be streamed from the cloud going forward and we will no longer own rights to files. Until then, Google has an answer for your purchased tunes if you upload them into Google Play Music.

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