By 
Google Music — or a version of what Google plans for Music to be — was shown off way back at I/O along with the debut of Android 2.2. It has since then been assumed that the launch of Music would most likely coincide with the launch of Android 3.0 (Gingerbread). From what has been revealed so far, the service will offer cloud-based functionality such as streaming from a desktop system to your Android handset as well as the ability to push song and album downloads directly to your phone. But when, exactly, does Google plan to unleash their counterattack on Apple’s iTunes?
The word is Andy Rubin has been hard at work in an attempt to get the service up and running by the holiday season, which does go hand-in-hand with the rumored release timeframe for Gingerbread. The problem is, so far Rubin and Google have failed to get any record labels to sign on to their music store. It isn’t that they don’t want to. One exec speaking on conditions of anonymity said, “finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform. What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.”
See, music execs would love to have someone come along and take the power out of iTunes’ hands, or at least alleviate some of the hold Apple has on the digital music distribution industry. But for the same reason negotiations with Google may take a while. Record labels are very protective of their intellectual property, if you hadn’t noticed, and are pretty hung up on big profits at the same time. We expect most if not all major distributors to hop on board, though whether or not negotiations will delay the debut of Google Music remains to be seen.
[via BGR]
If Google makes it compatible with other devices than Android they automatically win.
Its about time!! I refuse to use that itunes crap!!
It would be nice if maybe they let marketplace run on things that maybe um I don’t know, played music. At least besides phones.
Phones, tablets, tv, and music. Google for the win!
You would think Sony would sign…
Sounds like a good competitor.
I was under the impression that it wasn’t supposed to be a store, just a cloud based service for using your music across devices and such
Dumb. Just partner with Doubletwist and Amazon. They already have working product out there. Why reinvent the wheel?
Hahaha, nice move Google, can’t say iTunes is bad but I just love Google pwning Apple
Then they should just open up their Music Market just like their app market where anyone can upload their music.
If anything, partner with Ultra Records (Tiesto, Deadmau5, and a bunch of dance/trance artists) and whoever signed Lady GaGa and The Black-Eyed Peas and you pretty much win already. Those are real popular right now and should help them until they get others involved.
Buy Rhapsody
Google music is a stupid idea, they really should have partnered with the likes of amazon or a similar player and expanded their market worldwide. It would be much more simple and it would provide any anti-competitive/anti-google people with less ammunition to shoot over the google stern.
I really love google, and there needs to be a HUGE improvement in the digital movie, digital music, digital media delivery competition away from Apple, I just don’t believe that google is the right company to go down that road.
DoubleTwist is crap sorry its too slow for me
like we need to worry. record labels will be beating on the doors of google to sign. they’d be stupid not to
I can’t wait to get rid of itunes
Even though we as consumers may hate apple, content provider such as the music industry love them because they provide complete control over platform. This is abundantly clear by the fact one needs iTunes to add or remove songs from your iPod or apple’s other portable devices. This fact insurers the music industries profit will be protected. Where Google’s free market aproach fosters innovations. it is more prone to risk. Which is unappealing to an industry use to high profit margins.
“cloud-based functionality such as streaming from a desktop system to your Android handset”
Methinks someone doesn’t understand what “cloud-based” means…
Furthermore, can anyone give a use case scenario for when you would want to stream from your desktop to your phone?
I could see streaming in the other direction, phone -> desktop / multimedia center…
GO GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I will buy it all from you!!!!!!!
i have around 40 gigs of music on my desktop. it would be great to have access to from my phone. ( yes, I know there are apps that do this but they all kinda suck.) But why limit it to music? I want to be able to stream all of my media.
Spotify has the best idea so far….why the hell don’t they allow Spotify in the US? ….definitely an iTunes killer.
@D-Man – I get the feeling the cloud based bit was mostly in the second part of that statement, “the ability to push song and album downloads directly to your phone”, also why the hell would anyone want to stream data from their phone to a desktop pc, sure you might plug your phone in and play files directly from the SD card, but streaming, sitting in the same room as the pc with the phone in hand, and running the data up and down through the internet so you can listen to the files, feels a little like using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut? On the other hand I, like a lot of my friends keep a large archive of music stored locally on my Hard-drive, the ability to remotely access any of these files and listen to them using my phone on the move, without having to use up all the SD storage space, seems like a much more useful thing to me.
@D-Man
Why in the world do you want to stream from your phone to your computer? I cannot think of a single time I would want to do this.
I also think that streaming from my computer to my phone would be useful. That way I could keep all my music on my computer and save my SD space for apps and videos instead of keeping my music on it.