After months of rumors, Google’s cloud-based music player will be revealed at Google I/O, being held today May 10th and tomorrow May 11th. However, it will be a lot more basic than we had hoped.
The New York Times reports that the service will be called Music Beta by Google and will be very similar to Amazon’s recently released Amazon Cloud Player.
Like Amazon, Google will launch without the cooperation of the record labels. We had heard that the company had been tussling with the music industry, particularly the recently sold WMG, and it seems that few of those conflicts have been resolved.
“A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable business,” Jamie Rosenberg, director for digital content for Android told The New York Times. “So we’re not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.”
The result is a service lacking the “sexier” elements like sharing music, buying songs from Google (Amazon’s service allows users to buy songs) and offline caching. Music Beta by Google will allow users to load music that they own onto a server, letting them stream music onto Android phones and tablets using a mobile app or a web-based player. Playlists will also be transferred intact to users’ devices. Bonus users will be able to store 20,000 songs free of charge, as compared to Amazon’s 1,000 free-song upload.
The service launches as an invitation-only product; Verizon Xoom owners will score invites, and other interested parties can sign up at music.google.com. (Check back later for our review.) It only works on devices that support Flash, so iOS-ers are out of luck.
Although Google acknowledges that this service is only a first step, and it hopes to add more features with future label cooperation. Google’s hand was forced into this release since rival Amazon already launched their cloud player but the two services don’t compare. Amazon’s Cloud player is vastly superior making this release disappointing.
