Google Music Beta Review and Google’s Online Music Initiative
The whole time the media kept reporting how Google planned an online music service in the cloud to rival Amazon’s iTunes’ cloud music service, everyone was quite sure that there is something really special and revolutionary in the offing here. Google’s own plans seemed to be very ambitious too. It was supposed to be an online store as well as a place you could just store all your digital music and stream it on demand whenever you needed it.
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When Google finally unveiled the service, called Music Beta by Google, in the first half of May though, it didn’t do so to any fanfare. People expected greater things out of Google. Let’s see what wrong with Google’s online music service, shall we?
To start with, what we were promised out of Google’s online music initiative was a store combined with a cloud storage and streaming facility. Music Beta by Google however has no store. So is it a great storage and streaming facility? Well, the streaming isn’t as unrestricted as you would want it to be. And then, since there is no store on Google where you can buy tracks and transfer them to your Music account, any music on your account has to come from you. As the case with Amazon’s Cloud Drive, you need to upload all your stuff there to be able to stream it. Uploading all your music could definitely take a while.
So what exactly happened to Google’s grand plans? It’s what happens to any digital music streaming service that gets too big for its boots – the labels that hold all the rights to the tunes we want to listen to drape a big wet blanket on then. Google has been in months of negotiations with the big record labels to get them on board with its plans. And they got nowhere with them. The music labels apparently want too much money for too little freedom granted with the music, and Google apparently wants to go the other way.
Somehow, the music labels seem to be stuck in a time when people bought vinyl records that were sold in stores and when copying anything was very difficult. Anytime anything new comes along, they tend to see it as a way for the world to snatch away from them what they have and not as a business opportunity they could roll with. It really takes them a really long time to figure new technology out. And by the time they do figure it out, technology has moved on and no one’s interested anyway.
Music labels seem to believe that blocking technology and progress in this way is a good way in which to maximize revenues for themselves and for the artists. Blocking technology never works in most cases. And then there are the problems that Google has built into its Music Beta by Google service. To begin with, the service allows you to upload 20,000 tracks for free. So far so good. But then, you can only stream them to Android devices (although keep in mind that a lot of this may change as time goes along). Google doesn’t bother with how licensed or unlicensed your music is. They just offer storage space and they only allow you to access your own music, not anyone else’s. The Android streaming restriction could be a bit of a problem.
Return from Google Music Beta to Buy Music Downloads