Huawei is rolling out its own music service in Belgium
Michel van der Ven
Editor at Data News.
© MvdV
Now that the Chinese tech giant Huawei is not allowed to put Google services on its smartphones due to an American trade ban, the company is working on alternatives. One is Huawei Music, a potential competitor for Spotify and YouTube Music, which is also available in Belgium since this week.
The Huawei Music app has been on every Huawei device for many years, but until now it has been nothing more than a regular music player. After an update, however, the application has been transformed into a digital music store that must compete with Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and YouTube Music, among others. Huawei is gradually rolling out the service in Europe; after Germany, it was Belgium and the Netherlands this week.
Fifty million songs
The principle is identical: for € 9.99 per month, the music lover can stream unlimited songs (online and offline) from a catalog with - according to Huawei - more than fifty million songs, spread over 1.2 million albums by more than 600,000 artists. It also appears to be well filled in practice, because we also find most (popular) Belgian artists effortlessly. An act like Rammstein shines through absence, just like a few more obscure bands that we like to listen to, but all in all we could catch Huawei Music on few mistakes.
The interface is very similar to that of the competition and it also includes familiar ready-made playlists like Genre, Mood, Era and Activity. The app also offers some extras, such as skins to customize the look, a Party mode where multiple phones play the same music in sync and a Shazam-like feature to recognize and identify songs.
Owners of a Huawei smartphone can try the new service for free for a month. After that, a paid Premium subscription is required. Whether Huawei will also make the service available for other smartphones, via Google Play and / or the Apple App Store, is not yet known.