As much as this sounds like something I would personally be very interested in, I can't help but think it doesn't fit into Google's ideal of how customers use their products. Rather I get the impression they're pursuing this begrudgingly just as a way to get into the Indian market; the announcement is notably non-committal about it ever being rolled out in the US.
I'd buy this in a heartbeat if I could. No big hopes that it will come soon where I live though - google is just not hungry like Netflix and co it seems.
But no list view for music. Because when I'm on a tiny mobile screen I want to see over 3/4 of my artist list covered in album thumbnails that I don't recognize and half the text cut off because grid view is the hot new thing.
Still, hard to beat the value and the mood-based radio stations are awesome.
you are right on. This is google-version of the facebook PR fiasco with free internet.
They will never sell youtube RED to that market. RED is only for the san francisco bubble, where everyone already pay $100 overall for streaming services (hulu, netflix, pandora, spotify, etc, etc).
But for those other markets, they actually still rely on eyeballs and ads. And on those markets, they have to open a few concessions to actually get the eyeballs.
I've also found the offline use in Google Maps to be horribly unreliable. I had Google Maps set up with an offline map and, two times in a row, when I wanted to actually use it, the offline map had disappeared from my phone for whatever reason.
This was a good while ago, so I don't know, if it's still the case. All I know is that I switched to OsmAnd~, set that up once and since then always reliably had a map in my pocket.
