Lifehacker made the same point at the end of 2014 when Music Key premiered with their article, "What's the Point of YouTube Music Key?"

I have yet to try Google Play. While I am sure it is great, for some reason I have issues paying $9.99 per month after the 30 day trial. With Spotify, I just choose to get a 30 second ad about every 5 songs rather than paying the monthly fee as well. The irony though, is that I can easily spend around $10 during one visit at McDonalds (and much more when I go to happy hour somewhere), so I am unsure why I have such issues paying for music. I guess ever since I purchased my first CD burner in 1996 (2x burn speed for like $500 at the time), I have felt entitled to own as much music as I wanted for free.

Of course, "in theory", there are some private communities online to download high quality MP3s (and movies too). With Grooveshark gone, it will be interesting which websites will be next and how places like Google Play and Spotify evolve, both good and bad.

I couldn't hack the ads in Spotify and paid up for premium. Best decision I ever made.

I also happily pay my google play music subscription. It's a great service that I use a lot, so I don't really mind.

I've never paid a cent to Spotify and I've never seen a single ad. Didn't even know they had ads. U mad?

Maybe some countries do not have Spotify ads. The banner ads do not bother me at all really, but the 30 second audio ads somewhat do. However, I can listen to an entire album in decent quality with only 2-3 interruptions or 30 seconds or so.

Along with you guys who said it is worth paying, I am sure you are right. I am laughing at my thinking that I will spend money for happy hour or even McDonalds with no issues but a reasonable price like $9.99 per month for music and I feel entitled to get my music for free.

Like everything Google, I am also assuming Google Play will eventually be the #1 option for music. Maybe it already is but I am pretty sure Spotify is still perceived as #1 by most.

The important difference between the two for me is Spotify lets me listen to its library and that's pretty much it. The local file support it has sucks so many kinds of balls that it's more bother than it's worth. That means that I, as a Spotify user, only use Spotify to listen to music which is available on Spotify. Sadly, a lot of music that I like is not on there.

With Google Play Music, I listen to the music which is on there and if I wanna listen to something that's not on there, I just upload it to the service (and then I can stream it to any device). I might upload some famous artist which is not already on there or I might upload a song I recorded myself or with friends many years ago.

So Spotify does some of what I want, but Google does all of it. The choice is really simple. Had all the music I wanted to listen to been on Spotify, then I probably would have used it still.

Does Google have a better selection tore? Considering maybe going for that too...

I don't really know. I think I read somewhere that Google has slightly less music than Spotify which wouldn't surprise me considering Spotify is the #1 music streaming service, but considering I can upload what I miss, it doesn't really matter much.

Hmmmm ...
GrooveShark.io - listen to music on-demand at no charge

Info here.