Samsung’s ‘Milk Music’ service brings free tunes to Galaxy phones

It seems just about everyone wants a glossy new streaming music service to call their own.

Samsung today unveiled Milk Music, a free and attractive new streaming music app that seems to be its answer to iTunes Radio. The catch? The app is only available for Samsung’s Galaxy Android smartphones (although I’m sure tablet support is in the works, as well).

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Milk Music is actually a new incarnation of Samsung’s Music Hub app, which launched back in 2012 as its homegrown iTunes alternative. Samsung shut down that app in the U.S. back in December — probably because there wasn’t really much differentiating it from the plethora of other music services out there. With Milk Music, on the other hand, Samsung seems to be trying hard to offer something new and fun.

The app’s interface centers on a simple dial that you can use to pause and skip songs as well as tune to specific stations that suit your tastes. Photos related to the bands you’re listening to dominate every part of Milk Music’s interface. Simplicity seems to be the big focus — you don’t even need to log in to any special account to start using the app.

Milk Music is powered by Slack Radio and offers 13 million songs across 200 curated stations. You’re limited to six song skips per hour (similar to Pandora), so it won’t completely replace your existing music library or Spotify account. Still, Milk Music could serve as a simple way to choose some tunes when you don’t feel like browsing through playlists.

Samsung hasn’t revealed how it plans to make money from Milk Music. You can’t currently buy music directly from the app yet, but Samsung says that feature is in the works.

Samsung’s latest stab at streaming music comes little more than a month after the launch of Beats Music, which is also trying to differentiate itself with a cool-looking app and simple music discovery. Now that some of the bigger problems around streaming music have been solved (mostly licensing issues and the availability of fast mobile broadband), we can expect to see plenty more music apps trying to do something different.