Google Play Music aiming to be your personal mobile DJ

The revamped service is meant to serve the kind of music that best fits the situation whether it’s at work, at the gym, or simply at home being a potato. Image Google

Google’s design aesthetics is increasingly leaning toward personalization and assistance–case in point: the Pixel phones. Now it’s the Google Play music service’s turn for a makeover.

Google Play Music will now be utilizing the tools that other services have been privy to, such as machine learning, location tracking and weather. For example, opening the app on a Friday night will offer a list of club music to get users in the mood for a night of partying. Or if at home on a rainy weekend, some chill-out tunes for a relaxing mood. A curated workout playlist can pop up just as users enter the gym.

Apart from serving up recommended songs, Google Play Music will also take note of the songs that users like and keep them at the top of the list, ready to play when the situation calls for it.

Subscribers to the service will continue to receive playlist suggestions even when offline, based on what users listened to before. It guarantees a ready playlist even when users forget to download their music beforehand.

The team behind Google Play Music came from New York startup Songza, reports The Verge. The company had developed a system that would match playlists to the users’ moods but it required manually telling the system what mood the user was in.

Being hooked up to Google’s vast ecosystem of user-monitoring tools automated this process and made it more intuitive. “If you want to use data to improve people’s lives on a daily basis, music is the perfect fit,” says Elliot Breece, one of Songza’s co-founders.  Alfred Bayle