Google Music vs. Amazon

OK. So Google announced their Music beta. Personally I think it's a big step in the right direction and totally get their legal logic. Screw the labels. Avoid the publishers. A pure locker service where you can store up to 20k songs. That's a shitload more than the average Joe has out there in their digital catalogue, and for those with well over 100GB of music this could be a fantastic service. 

Here's where Google is differing from Amazon. They aren't selling music. And they are, therefore, not accessing a library of licensed master recordings that they have licensed for track sales. Google avoids dealing with the labels as the music is yours already. No dealing with the publishers either as they are not streaming from a central library as part of a subscription service. A pure cloud storage/streaming solution.

Downside? Well… you have to upload everything, but that's a one off. Again, for the average Joe with a thousand tracks or so this is minimal pain. The success would lay in the performance of the streaming and start times, as well as the interface. I really don't see the lack of track sales as a negative for the end user. The "Measure of Cool" has changed and ownership is a burden. When I was young the measure of cool (mock) was how many orange crates of vinyl you had stacked up in your room. Then it was how many shelves of CDs in your living room. That evolved to how many GB of MP#s you had on your hard drive and, of course, now the measure of cool is how much you can access at your fingertips without having to manage all of those files.

So Google Music beta is out, and can be a great thing. Will they succeed? Remains to be seen. What I would like to see is that they would make integration available to existing subscription services like Spotify, Rdio, etc. to be able to add my cloud to these excellent online services. And, of course, lift the US only restriction.

Google being Google I do expect to see some advertising showing up in any fermium model but this in itself will present problems. You can be sure that, if Google adds advertising around the metadata of my music library, artists and publishers will be coming fast and furious with a new license for using that metadata. But that is a subject I will save for another post.