Earlier today, Google announced Play Music Family Plans were coming this week. They actually went live later on this afternoon. Many were signing up for the plan, as it is cheaper to get a family of six onto this plan for $14.99 per month rather than paying $9.99 for each user or sharing accounts so that everyone can use Google Play Music. This is a much safer way of allowing everyone to do so.
However, when a few people with a Google Apps account went to sign up for the family plan, they were unable too. Stating that you can only set up a family account with a personal Google account and not an Apps account. However, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. Typically, features like this from Google roll out to the personal accounts first and then to Google Apps and Google Work accounts later on. We’re not sure why it takes longer, but it does. This includes Google For Work and Google for Education as well. So if you’re in college and your university uses Google for email and such, you’ll be stuck without a family plan, for now.
Google Play also launched a way for families to buy apps and have them be available to everyone in their family group, today. So if you want to buy a game and play with everyone in your family, you can buy it on your family account and everyone in the group will have access to that game. It’s a great way to get families into playing games, but also great for allowing everyone to have simpler billing when it comes to apps and games in Google Play. Lately Google has been doing some pretty neat things with Google Play and families. Not to mention their work with education.
So for now, Google Play Music’s family plan is not available for Google Apps accounts. Currently there is no word from Google on when that might be available. We’ll be sure to update everyone once we learn when the family plan will be available for the Google Apps account customers. Cross your fingers that it won’t be too far out.