Google makes New Release Radio available to all

Google Play Music has rolled out its New Release Radio personalized playlist to all listeners across its free and subscription tiers. The curated playlists contain newly released music that Google’s machine learning platform determines each user would like. It’s a similar style of playlist-driven new music discovery where Spotify was an early pioneer, but most major streaming services have borrowed the concept for their own feature sets.

The feature debuted in June as an exclusive for the owners of Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus smartphones. When that was announced, it seemed like an unusual choice to make this type of functionality unique to one hardware platform, but it now seems that the deal between Samsung and Google to use Google Play Music as its official music provider isn’t just about getting an awareness boost. Google’s blog post described the Samsung rollout as part of an “early access program” that provided feedback on the new playlist. Samsung device owners may find that being a guinea pig for works in progress is less of a draw to use the music platform than the chance to have special features.