Dive Brief:

• Samsung and Google have teamed up to make Google Play Music the default music player and music service on Samsung tablets and phones beginning with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, according to a blog post from Google.
• New Samsung device owners will get double the Google Play Music storage capacity typically offered and be able to download and play up to 100,000 songs for free. In addition, new Samsung devices will feature a three-month free trial of Google Play Music, which provides 40 million songs on demand, and access to YouTube Red’s ad-free videos. 
• Google Play Music will be integrated into Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby when it launches later this spring to allow Samsung phone and tablet users to ask Bixby to play songs. 

Dive Insight:

By partnering with Google on Google Play Music, Samsung is throwing down another gauntlet in the smartphone wars. If the glowing reviews weren’t enough, Google Play Music gives device shoppers further reason to check out and possibly buy a Galaxy S8 over an iPhone. Samsung decided to kill its streaming music service Milk Music last year, and Business Insider said the introduction of Google Play Music on its devices is a welcome realization on the part of Samsung that its software doesn’t compare to better Google services. Google Play Music offers many of the same features as Apple Music with the main difference being that Google Play Music is fully web-based.

Samsung’s reputation has already rebounded from the Galaxy Note 7 debacle and it’s poised to sell plenty of S8 units — 60 million S8 phones are expected to sell this year compared to 48 million S7 phones sold last year, per TheStreet — but this latest development provides a new push for Samsung to distance itself from its nightmarish last year and regain its position atop the smartphone market.

For Google, the move by Google Play Music, which generally lets customers store MP3 files on their devices and stream music for $9.99 per month, into Samsung devices catapults the music service onto a large stage where it can prove to millions of customers that it delivers against Spotify and Apple Music. As The Verge notes, Google has to date trailed far behind its music streaming competitors.