Today Google announced that as a new free-tier offering they would begin allowing people to stream their curated radio stations, albeit with advertisements. This offering is based upon their acquisition of Songza last year, and gives users access to dozens of different stations based on genre, mood, decade, or activity. I’ve been previewing it this afternoon and I have to say I’m impressed. The song mixes I’ve heard so far have been pleasant and you can thumbs-up and thumbs-down tracks as you see fit.

Obviously Google is targeting the release of Apple Music at the end of the month, but I think there’s a bigger victim of this service and that’s Pandora. Although Pandora can base its stations on any artist that you type in, I have a hard time believing that you couldn’t find a station in the mix that wouldn’t work for you. Google takes it to another level though with the fact that their music library is over 30 million tracks compared to the 1.5 million at Pandora. This means a lot more selection of tracks that could make it to a station. Additionally, the stations are curated by humans, so that means that some of the sillier choices that Pandora makes should never happen with Google Music.

Today is the first day of the launch to the general public, but Google Play Music listeners have had these stations for a while now. I’m looking forward to checking this offering out more, and it may entice me into subscribing (which is the point of free stuff anyway).