Google Takes On Apple’s ‘iCloud’ With Launch Of ‘Music Beta’ Service

Posted on May 10, 2011 by AppleBitch


Google has taken the bull by the horns and beaten Apple’s rumored ‘iCloud’ music locker to the market. The search giant has today announced the launch of a new ‘Music Beta’ service which will allow users to store up 20,000 music tracks in an online storage area and download and stream the content at will from any device with network access. 

The new service is a direct competitor to the highly anticipated service which Apple is expected to announce at some point in the coming months, although no official confirmation of its existence or release date has been issued.  ‘Music Beta’ also competes with Amazon’s Cloud Player service which was recently launched without full agreement from music labels.  However, the free service is currently only open through an invitation based system for users based in the USA.

In terms of pricing, the service is currently free while in Beta but Google may choose to implement a charge when the service opens up to the general public.  Again, Apple has not announced any pricing for it’s rumored music service although it is expected that the current $99 MobileMe annual charge will be dropped in favor of a lower monthly subscription, although some sources have indicated a $20 per year charge for the new iCloud service, expected to replace MobileMe.

Google has apparently not yet secured agreements with music labels, so is therefore in much the same boat as Amazon.  Apple, on the other hand, has reportedly managed to sign several of the major record labels up to their new service and as iTunes is the market leader in online music sales, may launch at a later date, but to a stronger position in the US market than Google and Amazon.

Not Quite A Tortoise…

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  • Prof. Peabody

    I think everyone is just giving Google free advertising here by making out that this is some kind of “iTunes competitor.” How is this an iTunes competitor? How is this even a “music service” or a Music app”? (terms I’ve seen this morning in discussions about this thing)

    It’s a hard drive in the cloud. Period. You can’t buy music, you can’t do any of the things that iTunes does. All you can do is take files (if you own some), and throw them up to the cloud just like any other hard drive in the sky. iDisk has had this capability including the music streaming for at least a year or so and when that came out it wasn’t even formally announced by Apple. The coverage from the tech media was almost a footnote.

    Now Google does it, but adds a lot of PR about what they *intend* to do with this service in the future, and every blog in town writes a giant story about it. Wake me up when Google has an actual store, an actual agreement with the media companies, an actual app to play the stuff and all the other infrastructure. Right now they are getting a free ride in the media for re-inventing the hard drive concept

    • http://www.applebitch.com AppleBitch

      I think you’re right which is why I phrased it as a potential iCloud competitor rather than iTunes (it’s not as if Google is selling the music after all). To me, it seems like a rush to get it to market before Apple as, with Amazon, there are no agreements with music labels.

      It is, as you say, a hard drive in the cloud.

  • Anonymous

    ”
    The new service is a direct competitor to the highly anticipated service which Apple is expected to announce at some point in the coming months, although no official confirmation of its existence or release date has been issued.”

    That’s their hope anyway, if they are lucky, since Apple has yet to announce much of anything. Otherwise, it may be about as much as a direct competitor as Honeycomb has turned out to be to the iPad.

    Joe