Music streaming: free is the key

Competing music streaming services are beginning to discover that the best way to get consumers to sign up and to start paying a monthly subscription is to offer a free tier, too. On Wednesday, Google announced that Google Play Music subscribers can now upload and store 50,000 tracks to the cloud free of charge that they can then stream via a smartphone, tablet or even desktop whenever they've got an internet connection. The offer's interesting partly because it recognizes that older c