If you’re a subscriber to Google Play Music, the last week or two have been pretty exciting. With the announcement of YouTube Red, which will be bringing an ad-free viewing experience to YouTube, will be bundled into your Google Play Music subscription cost. There’s even more news to rejoice about.
Google has announced a way to make Google Play Music your one stop shop for media content. Google Play Music will now include Podcasts, making it the one of the best options on the Play Store for everything that you’ll need to keep up to date.
Google Play Music helps connect people with the perfect soundtrack for whatever they’re doing—whether they’re stuck in rush hour traffic, staying up late with friends or lifting weights at the gym. But what if that same technology and curation could help connect people with great podcasts based on their mood or interest—something to make them laugh, get lost in a story or learn something new? We thought that would be awesome, so we plan to start offering podcasts on Google Play Music, giving podcasters access to millions of new listeners on Android phones and tablets.
Currently, there’s a portal where podcasters can start uploading their podcasts into the Google Play Services. Now, what makes the podcast integration with Google Play Music a bit different from the likes of Pocketcasts, is how the podcasts are populated. With Pocketcasts, you can add different options via their RSS feeds, however, with Google Play Music the provider will have to upload their podcasts directly.
At the time of this writing, there are more of a dozen different podcasters and podcast networks that have already joined Google Play Music, and have started uploading. Here’s a list of some of those that can be found on day one when podcast integration is rolled out to the end-user:
- 5by5
- Dave Ramsey
- Earwolf
- HBO
- HowStuffWorks
- Nerdist/Legendary
- This Week in Tech
Having everything you want to listen to in one place, will be extremely convenient, and is awesome that Google is implementing new content. We haven’t been given a time frame as to when we will start seeing the ability to add podcasts on our devices. Hopefully, it will be sooner rather than later, so that we can get rid of any extra apps that may be clogging up space on our devices.
In the mean time, if you are a podcaster and want to jump on the hype train, head over to the link here, and get to uploading. Drop us a line in the comments below with your favorite podcast apps, and whether you will be replacing that app with Google Play Music.
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