Now Podcasts Are Available In Google Play Music
It is no secret that Google was working on incorporating podcasts into Google Play Music. After all, they declared the service back in October of 2015, still, it was restricted to users uploading their podcasts.
A somewhat smart move, at the time, as it gave content creators several months to fill the new marketplace with podcasts so the service wouldn’t be empty upon launch.
Officially Google has begun rolling out podcasts as a new feature of Google Play Music. Introducing today on both the web and in the Android app, a user will be able to discover, subscribe, and listen to their favorite podcasts right in the same place user already listen to music. Beyond searching for particular podcasts user already know, Google will also offer user new shows based on their activities, mood, and interests, much like it already does for music.
From Google:
“Starting today on the web and rolling out on Android in the U.S. and Canada, we'll connect you with podcasts based on what you're doing, how you're feeling and what you're interested in. Similar to our contextual playlists for music, we want to make it easy to find the right podcast—whether you're a podcast aficionado or listening for the first time”
Podcast makers can easily get begin with bringing their shows to Google Play through Google’s podcast.
The podcast section of Play Music looks fundamentally the same to the rest of the Play Music application with its orange hues, cards layout, and focus on cover art with small expandable descriptions. It's distributed into two tabs for featured shows and your subscriptions, with a search bar at the top. However, our tipster Curtis points out that the search function is universal across all of Play Music for now, which means that user will get songs, artists, albums, playlists, and videos before the user even sees the podcasts in the results.
When we subscribe to a podcast, you also get asked whether we want to automatically download the last 5 episodes and get notified about new releases. And finally, the Now Playing screen is very similar to that of the Play Music songs, except that the thumbs up and down icons have been swapped with the 30s backward and forward skip buttons — a requirement in any podcast player.
There's no word yet on an official launch, and we're still waiting to see the inevitable Web and iOS clients. However, it appears that everything will launch very soon.