Today’s weather forecast is cloudy with a chance of lawsuits. According to our TMT farm teams at Rolling Stone and Billboard, Google is rolling out their own cloud-based music service. Much like the Amazon cloud service that Mr P just totally made up off the top of his head as an early April Fool’s joke, Google Music is real. Terrifyingly real. Okay, almost none of that is true. But look! Paragraph two, here I come!
Google Music seems to offer a few significant upgrades to that clunky old Amazon Cloud Drive jalopy. For starters, it’s free while in Beta and comes with roughly 20,000 songs worth of storage space (in contrast to Amazon’s 1,000 songs-worth). It also seems to work a little better with all of the stupid, non-recyclable shit that a lot of us already own. A special Music Manager tool, available for both Windows and Mac, lets users add songs directly to Music Beta simply by clicking on a certain folder (like the iTunes Music folder), after which all of your songs, playlists, ratings, diary pages, and social security information are added to Music Beta. After the 800 hours it will take to upload your whole library to the ether, you can then stream all of your taste-making, list-topping music to any Google-linked device with internet access.
So what are the cons? Well, let’s see: unlike Amazon’s thing, you can’t actually purchase music with Google Music. You can only grab stuff you’ve already got. Also, it needs flash to work at the moment, so it’s a no-go for iPhones and iPads. Aaaand since its Beta, it’s invite-only right now, which I suppose is frustrating, although I’m pretty sure everyone knows someone who works for that company in some capacity. Oh yeah, and there’s also that pesky little problem of Google, much like Amazon, not actually, technically, completely, per se getting, you know, permission from the labels to go ahead with this service. But in his keynote presentation earlier today, Google’s Paul Joyce stated that he talked to some of the label’s girlfriends when he ran into them at the gym the other week and he’s “like, pretty sure” that it’s “all gravy.” God, I miss Lala.
• Introductory Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrNhKcxBbZo
• More on Google Music Beta: http://music.google.com
• Um… Google: http://google.com
