Earlier this week, Google beat Apple to the punch by launching a streaming subscription music service before Cuperino could unveil its own offering, iRadio.

How did Google managed to do it? Apple has all the music industry clout, so how could Google swing a deal first? Because Google Play Music All Access is essentially a clone of services like Rdio and Spotify, and the contract terms of services like that are easy to copy.

Apple’s iRadio? It’s a wholly different beast.

Google has announced that Google Play Music is now available in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Portugal. The free service, which allows you to store 20,000 tracks in the cloud, is accessible on Android, via a web browser on your computer, or via third-party apps on other platforms.

The popular method for listening to music online has shifted from $0.99 paid downloads to subscription services like Spotify and Rdio. Bigger tech companies like Samsung have tried to claim their piece of the music subscription pie, and Apple is rumored to be entering the space with some sort of ‘iRadio’ product.

That’s why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google is working on its own music streaming service too.

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to music players is lack of support for gapless playback, so you can imagine my excitement when I heard that the Google Music Player had been updated to support it.