Samsung to start charging Milk money for its streaming music service

Samsung Milk
Another streaming service falls to ads

After a month and change, the ad-free ride on Samsung's Milk streaming music service looks to be coming to an end.

Samsung posted a new infographic about its new streaming service, covering usage numbers and the like. Towards the bottom of the post, which appears to have been pulled, the infographic also mentions the service is being split into two new tiers.

The free service is, well, free, but it will be filled with ads.

Users that want to go ad-free, meanwhile, will have to fork over $3.99 (about £2.37,AU$4.27). The infographic doesn't specify exactly when the premium service will go into effect except for noting it will be available soon.

Falling in line

Samsung's Milk service launched just over a month ago without ads but a limited ability to skip over six tunes. It also featured the unique ability to instantly switch between nine different songs from the same number of varying genres.

Samsung all along said the ad-free-only option would be a limited time deal.

Now with the new paid package it still come in for half the price of Spotify subscription while matching Pandora's over $3.99 (about £2.37, AU$ 4.27) subscription fee.

Compared to other music apps, Milk Music still lags behind with only access to 13 million songs and 200 different music stations. Spotify, meanwhile, noted it had 20 million songs available in it's music library on its fifth birthday last October.

It's also by far the most limited as the app only runs on Samsung Galaxy phones in the United States. However, with this new paid package Samsung may expand the service to more Android phones by putting the app on the Google Play Store.

TechRadar has asked Samsung for more details on its Milk Music plans, and we'll update this post when we hear back.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.