An interesting day in music streaming: Taylor Swift truthers and Google Play’s new free tier

AFTER Taylor Swift’s very public disagreement with Apple and their quick back pedal, the internet now has a giant conspiracy theory about the two.

COLOGNE, GERMANY - JUNE 19: Taylor Swift performs during 'The 1989 World Tour' night 1 at Lanxess Arena on June 19, 2015 in Cologne, Germany. (Photo by Sascha Steinbach/Getty Images for TAS)

JUST a week before Apple releases its highly anticipated Apple Music service, Google has updated its own music streaming platform to offer a free tier of music streaming.

Similar to Spotify and Pandora, the free version of Google Play Music is designed to attract more customers to its subscription service while also providing artists another income stream.

The service, which operates as a pre-created radio station, uses Songza technology, a company that Google acquired last July and which provides musical selections based on the customers’ location, the time of day, past preferences and songs that at any given time are determined to be to their tastes.

While the new free tier launches today in the USA, Google Australia told news.com.au that there’s nothing else to announce for now in regards to international availability. The company’s history of rolling out international products in services has been a bit of a mixed bag, so the free tier could drop here within weeks or months.

Google Play Music is one of the must underrated music streaming services on the market, which offers the ability to fill in the songs it might be missing by uploading up to 20,000 songs of your own into the cloud to be able to be streamed on any device. This is something no other service offers right now.

Sneaky PR move? Or the power of Taylor Swift?

Google’s new free tier move comes just days after Taylor Swift criticised Apple for not paying artists, and after the singer removed all her music from Spotify and several other streaming services because she believed free streaming tiers “devalued music”. Google Play Music is one of the services where her music still remains, so it will be interesting to see if she and other artists with the same stance keep their music on Google’s streaming service.

Since Swift’s big smackdown of Apple and their quick change of policy with paying artists, many internet conspiracy theorists, including Pandora’s co-founder Tom Conrad believe Apple and Tay Tay are pulling a swiftie.

2/ Swift took her new album off Spotify not because she's not paid, but because she feels their free service "devalues music"

— Tom Conrad (@tconrad) June 22, 2015

4/ Swift's career was built on terrestrial radio play, which is a free service AND doesn't pay recording artists a dime.

— Tom Conrad (@tconrad) June 22, 2015

6/ Reminder: Apple uses music to make billions off hardware. Artists see nothing from this.

— Tom Conrad (@tconrad) June 22, 2015

7/ Swift's letter and Apple's response is mostly theater. Nothing here to suggest Apple treats artists more fairly than anyone else.

— Tom Conrad (@tconrad) June 22, 2015

I firmly believe that Apple Music and Taylor Swift pulled a big PR publicity stunt with the payment talks.

— Moshe/Moses Isaacian (@MosheIMedia) June 23, 2015

Let's applaud Apple and @taylorswift13 on a masterfully executed PR stunt that will end up getting even more users for @AppleMusic's launch

— Chandni Shah (@chandnishah) June 23, 2015