Google is currently running a promotion for Play Music — its music streaming service — offering new subscribers four months of free subscription. Once the subscription period ends, these subscribers will have to shell out $9.99 per month.
The app lets users upload around 50,000 songs from their personal libraries with no additional cost. A premium, subscription-based account provides users access to 40 million songs on-demand with no ads, no skipping track limits. Usually, new subscribers get 30 days for free access to such services, but the promotion offers 3 times that.
But what about the existing subscribers?
Well, the company seems to have left open a loophole which provides existing consumers a way to get the free subscription offer. According to many Reddit users who commented on a thread called “4 months free Google Music still working.” If you are located in one of the countries eligible for the promotion, you might be able to get the free subscription worth around $40, even if you are an existing subscriber.
All these subscribers need to do is cancel their existing subscription and subscribe again and they will be able to avail the promotion as the system will treat them as new subscribers.
However, there is a catch here — in case, you have used this loophole multiple times in the past to avail multiple free trials in the past, you might not get four months free subscription. Even if you used the free trials in the last year, you will get a free subscription but it just might be one, two or three months but not the full term.
One thing is not clear though — how Google calculates a year — does it refer to one year from the start of the free promotion or one year from the start of the subscription.
The promotion might not be limited to U.S. and U.K.-based customers, as earlier expected.
Some users have also commented on the Reddit thread, that they were able to subscribe from countries such as Netherlands with subscription ending January 2018, which means that the subscription will be available from the date of the start of the promotion.
Google earlier offered a free year of subscription.
Google Play Music is the search giant’s attempt at matching toe to toe with services such as Spotify and iTunes, but the company has come late to the music streaming market and is still working on establishing its foothold in the market, even though every Android phone comes with the app pre-installed. Currently, the user only uses the app for playing songs present in their phone memory.
Google has also partnered with Samsung for its Galaxy S8 device and is offering double the number of tracks — 100,000 tracks to S8 users. It is also offered an early promotion of new exclusive features with the device such as “New Release Radio” which will provide users with a daily, personalized play light of new music releases. Features such as the playlist were offered to all users in July.