Google Play Music All Access and Books expand to new regions

Content stores can be pretty tough work, mostly because of all the licenses that need to be acquired for all of the different countries of the world. While Google Play has done well to get on par with iTunes as far as its app store, Google is still lagging a bit behind in terms of international support for other media like Books and Music. Google is finally taking the conquest of Europe more serious and has expanded the availability of its Play Books and All Access Music services to 13 new countries. The latest ones to get access to to the Books and Music part of the Google Play Store are Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. Users in those countries now have access to millions of books and songs in the newly redesigned Play Store, which was launched a few days ago. The newly added 13 countries now join Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States to make a total of 27 countries that have access to the Google Play Store Books. Google Play Music is currently available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, United States, and United Kingdom, in addition to the aforementioned list of countries. That's about another 27 million people that can now get in on All Access. 

Folks down in Australia and New Zealand will be the first outside of the U.S. to get Google's latest subscription music service, Google Play Music All Access. An update to a Google Play support document today lists the two countries as having the new service available, with little else to go on. Presumably the appropriate deals have been made to offer the entire music collection available here in the U.S. to folks down under. All Access seems to be pretty well-received so it's great to see the service expand outside of the states. Hopefully this paves the way for additional countries to get the service in the coming months, as over a dozen countries currently have access to the basic user-upload Google Play Music features. 

Google is offering a special deal for early adopters – Australians who sign up by August 31 will pay just AU$9.99 per month (after a thirty-day trial period), and early bird New Zealanders will pay NZ$10.99 per month following the free thirty-day trial. Those who sign up after the end of August will pay AU$11.99 and NZ12.99 respectively. Google also reminds potential customers that they can upload up to 20,000 songs from their current collection, though the service's real claim to fame is the ability to stream, ad-free, unlimited amounts of music (or as much as your data connection can handle).