Google's music service will sell and store songs on cloud accounts ~ student Box Office

Nov 18, 2011

Google's music service will sell and store songs on cloud accounts

2:12 AM vikram reddy No comments

Looking to extend its reach as a hub for entertainment and social networking, Google on Wednesday introduced a set of music features, including a download store to compete with iTunes.

The service, Google Music, will sell individual tracks and full albums, letting customers store the songs on servers, on so-called cloud accounts. And through an integration with Google's nascent social network, Google(PLUS), the company will also let customers share music by offering friends one free listen to any bought track.

Google Music puts the company in competition with Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Many analysts saw the move as part of an escalating war among those companies to develop consumer environments.

"They've got to make their ecosystem appeal to consumers in a way that Amazon and Apple have," said Michael Gartenberg, a media analyst with Gartner. "Personal cloud services are what's going to drive the next wave of consumer adoption. So Google has to be playing here. But because they're so late they have to be playing here in a unique way."

Google will sell music through the Android Market, where users of its mobile phone system buy apps, videos and e-books. The service is an expansion of Music Beta, which the company introduced in May, and will store customers' songs in remote servers and allow users to listen to them on any device or computer.

Google Music will have 13 million songs for sale, the company said. But while music from three of the four major record companies and many independents will be included, Google has so far been unable to reach a licensing agreement with the Warner Music Group. Warner, the third-largest major label, has artists including Green Day, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin.

The music service is also, to large degree, a way to enhance the company's mobile offerings to compete with Apple's iPhone.

Google's announcement, held at a Los Angeles art studio and shown on YouTube, came two days after Apple opened its iTunes Match service, which for $25 a year lets users back up music in the cloud through a more efficient system than Google offers. But in the presentation, Jamie Rosenberg, a Google executive, noted that its cloud backup was free.