Google opens Android music store in iTunes' face Google has opened up its beta Music service to all US computer users, and has plumped for free as the best model for music streaming. “The Google Music service will continue to be free,” Jamie Rosenberg, Google’s head of digital content for Android, said. “Other cloud music services think you have to pay to stream music you …
It DOES make iCloud look rather naff.
Why?
a) it's free (with free space for you to upload 20,000 of your own songs to stream anywhere)
b) it's got better paid-for artists onboard (all the major labels)
c) It's got better indie artist support (Artist pages, royalty-free publishing for wannabe artists)
d) It's got a far bigger audience 200m Android users for starters.
Sorry Nergatron, Barry Shitpeas the fandroid-in-chief has decreed it thus, and therefore so it is. No amount of rational discussion or reason will change this and woes-betide the criticiser of the Holy Chocolate Factory of Maintain View or any of their products for they are greatest and can do no wrong. Ever.
I wonder if they will de-duplicate the music storage. This would require only a tiny fraction of the storage especially as so many people will have the same must haves in their collection.
They can already identify a track from a sound sample so perhaps in the future you can play them a clip through your phone and they will link the song to your collection.
Unfortunately... listening to a few seconds of a track and identifying which one of (many) remixes or versions of it is not the same. I'd be slightly annoyed at uploading the extended remix dub version of Little Fluffy Clouds only to play it back and get the shortened (which in this case is under 5 minutes) version played back.
While de-dupe could be done, it will not be a pleasant prospect and will only work exceptionally well on content purchased through the embedded store.
Apple started with 5 labels, some more indies and that was 8 years ago.
Oh, I forgot the new feature is that any monkey with a guitar can sell their songs on this service. Hoppiedodidoo..
Can't wait to see how that turns out if it's anything like the Android Market... look for Coldplay get SlightlyColdplay, Couldplay, Cooldplay, Cuoldplay, Cuckoldplay... Plus lots of fart songs.
Excellent idea! 5 *****
Is the bit about artists selling directly, this seems like it could be very disruptive to the established industry. I can see Apple adding this if they can do so without the labels cutting them off, and google adding a match service, because uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data just isn't funny over consumer broadband.
We're getting a little closer to a flat rate all you can eat service with every new music store that launches, which is nice.
After all this time and they still have not leaned anything from the now defunct Allofmp3.com or the current crop of Russian and Ukrainian low cost music sites. Sure, you will get some of the Itunes crowd, yet you are missing out on a big market. Why pay .99 cents a song when one can go to these unsanctioned sites and get songs for .10 cents. Heck, on one site, you can get the latest Rihanna CD, Talk that Talk, for .88 cents. A whole CD for less than the cost of one song at Itunes or Google.
Bandwidth, servers and infrastructure cost a lot of money. These sites must be making good profits even at these low prices or they would not be staying in business.
In addition to the low cost, most songs these days are at least 192kbs, with more and more being 320kbs, and all DRM free. Can Itunes and Google make the same claims?
How long does Google think it can act as an advertiser (and the primary portal to services through the web for most people) and a competitor to supply those same services? This is a serious conflict of interest. Would you trust a competitor to be the primary link to new customers? Google has to decide which business it wants to be in, or it will inevitably be forced to do so.
I joined up and am awaiting approval so that I can prepare to sell the tunes from my upcoming EP. For unsigned indie musicians, this could work quite well. Myspace abandoned us for the big four. It's not easy to get into iTunes. This gives us a way to sell music to the large number of Android handset users and if Android Tablets ever gain traction, will be selling to them as well.
The only problem is that the majority of "unlimited" data plans are actually subject to acceptable usage policies and the vast majority of mobile users world-wide still do not have anything like unlimited bandwidth.
Data plans will often provide enough capacity to give you unlimited browsing of the web, email, app downloads, etc or reasonably huge limits that you are unlikely to reach. However, when you add streaming media to this, you can very quickly run up quite a large data balance!
If it's streaming everything off a server, it's not going to be very popular with the mobile networks as it will create havoc on their infrastructure and it could end up costing some end users an absolute fortune in data charges if they go beyond their 'unlimited' plans.
What a hopelessly inefficient way of playing music on your mobile! Instead of using a few Watt/hours of energy for playing a track straight from your memory card, you're going to use countless servers, disks, routers and transmitters to listen to the same track, but with a few pauses for buffering.
Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be. What point am I missing?
Is it me, or is Google becoming a 'me, too' company like MicroSoft? They see something successful out there -- facebook, itunes, etc -- and come out with their own version that seems rather me-too-ish. I might be wrong, there may be B2B things they're doing that are mind-blowing, but the consumer-facing ones seem a bit ... derived, for lack of a better term.
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