Ahead of Apple Music’s launch on June 30, rival Google has announced a free, ad-supported tier of its Google Play Music service. The free tier offers users in the U.S. themed radio stations curated by Google’s music experts – including the creators of Songza Media Inc., a company Google acquired in July.

The free tier will include all of the 30 million songs available in the paid version of Google Play Music, but there are some differences and restrictions.

Users can pick from radio stations organized by genre, mood, decade or activity, or search for a favorite artist, album or song to instantly create a station of similar music, but they have no control over what songs are played.

Along with predefined playlists and ads, free users are limited to six skips per hour, cannot rewind songs or scrub through them, cannot play songs offline, and there is no “playing next” feature. Instead, these features are reserved for the paid tier of Google Play Music.

It appears Google is using the free tier to encourage users to sign up for the full feature paid Google Play Music service at $9.99 per month rather than trying to simply make money off ads – although there certainly will be a fair amount of revenue ‘streaming’ in from ads regardless. According to the CMO Council, mobile music has the greatest share of dollars coming from ads, and will hold that position with advertising dollars making up 79.3% in 2015

In a blog announcing the free service Google Music product manager Elias Roman wrote:

We hope you’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll consider subscribing to Google Play Music to play without ads, take your music offline, create your own playlists, and listen to any of the 30 million songs in our library on any device and as much as you’d like. You’ll also get ad-free, offline and background features for music videos on YouTube. And with or without a subscription, you can store and play up to 50,000 songs from your own collection for free.

The new free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music is launching first in the U.S. It’s available on the web today and is rolling out this week to Android and iOS.

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