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Google launched their “Google Music” cloud service over 5 months ago and although its been been great for consumers — label executives weren’t exactly too fond of the idea. Google Music, in it’s current form, is definitely great for your current music library but if there’s one area where it’s sorely lacking it’s being able to cough up some cash and actually buy new music.
Well, according to New York Times, Google is already making the necessary steps towards opening up their own MP3 store, allowing for quick and easy song purchases. Apparently, a few music execs let the cat out of the bag saying Google intends on opening their music store in the next few weeks. Not only does this fall in line with the Ice Cream Sandwich announcement but this could also be an attempt from Google to steal away some of the thunder from Apple’s upcoming cloud music service (iTunes Match).
More than likely, this new MP3 store will be tied into Google Music Beta where you could make an MP3 purchase and instantly stream it to various devices from the cloud. This could completely do away with the painful process of uploading huge music libraries to Google Music where users had to spend days, even weeks to access their music from the cloud. Still, I think it would be pretty neat to browse the Android Market for books, movies, apps and music. Every type of media, all in one place.
Big moves, as always, from Google HQ. The only thing that could mess this deal now are those skittish label execs who have always been more than a little wary of Google’s open reputation. Let’s hope everything works out.
[Via NYTimes]
As long as it has decent music discovery then I’m all for it.
Seems to me mp3 stores are old and busted. The new hotness is the subscription model of spotify et al. Really hope google is going that route , because their music algorithm for finding similar songs is fantastic
Welcome to Rhapsody of 5 years ago.
I don’t know why people think that Spotify is so new and ground breaking. Its the exact same thing as Rhapsody.
Don’t have to tell me. I have Mog. If I didn’t have Mog, I’d probably have Rdio or Qriocoty. I said Spotify et al, just because it’s the most well-known (even though it’s the newest).
But I don’t think it’s accurate to say the model is 5-years-old. Five years ago, you couldn’t store songs for offline listening on your smartphone, which is the feature that sold it to me.
I think Spotify may have some issues if they don’t change their Facebook lovefest. As of a few weeks ago you could only sign up if you had a Facebook account. I just cancelled my premium subscription last week because of this.
Bring it Google!
Weird how this was posted as soon as I installed Google Music Beta 4.0.1 (leaked from Nexus Prime) onto my DroidX. o.o
I honestly love Music Beta but I’ve seen similar services that make it so complicated to use. I just hope Google keeps the simple UI for the MP3 store.
Things like this makes me feel Google is overreaching. It has a great OS on which any number of music service providers can create apps and stores. That’s the advantage of android, so i wish google would stop trying to be a movie seller, music seller, etc.
You’re right! Just look at how terribly that worked for Apple
And Amazon as well, once their Kindle Fire goes on sale.
And I mean, the android market is totally a flop.
I personally would like to see Google launch a combined service like Google Media that allows the online storage and accessibility to Music, videos, and pictures as well as the ability to purchase music and movies and store them in the cloud to be accessed anywhere and all from a single interface.
if there’s one area where it’s sorely lacking it’s being usa exclusive
Couldn’t agree more. Time the rest of the world got a look in I say.
Independent music FTW. That’s all I buy anyways.
Im sorry, but i cant bear how much the audio quality from my music files diminishes when streaming with Google Music. On my Nexus S and on the desktop, it sounds awful.
I hope that we will have the ability to move the music back and forth from phone to cloud for listening when not on wifi or when we don’t want to burn data.
if they come out with a subscription based service like napster to go i’m so there.
buying one tune at a time sucks i got 60 gigs(7500 tracks) on my mp3 player and it only costs me 15 bucks a month so over the last 3 years the total cost is about 550 bucks.
a helluva lot cheaper than a buck a song.
I would say the one thing that it is lacking is my ability to use it merely because I don’t like in the States.
Chances are it’ll be open worldwide once it moves out of beta. I can send you an invite if you want one.
Finally. Hopefully I can leave the iron grip of iTunes.