After first teasing the feature over five months ago, podcasts are now ready for your ears inside of Google Play Music.
Google unveiled the feature Monday by highlighting several groups of related podcasts, similar to how the service handles music curation. A report that Google would do so, linked to a leaked NPR email, turned out to be dead on.
Podcasts are already live in the web version of Google Play Music, though it appears you’ll need to wait for the usual staggered app update rollout for the feature to hit Android. In announcing the new feature, Google Play Product Manager Ilia Malkovitch highlighted some of the groupings that may appeal to you.
Try “Learning Something New” to talk about at a dinner party and listen to our favorite episodes from Stuff You Should Know or How To Do Everything. Enjoy a Sunday afternoon by “Getting Lost in a Story” with episodes from Radiolab or Reply All, or relax after a long day by “Laughing Out Loud” to Marc Maron’s WTF or Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist.
You don’t need a subscription to Google Play Music streaming to check out any of the offerings, though you will have to put up with advertisements in the app’s interface.
Why this matters: Google Play is a major piece of the company’s digital strategy, and adding podcasts has been a major hole. As we’ve highlighted before there are several good podcast apps to be found if you’d rather not switch over to another app, particularly if the podcast you’re looking for isn’t yet available.
