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Digital
Google Music to have storage at its heart, says Billboard
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 15 September 2010
According to Billboard, Google is planning a combined a la carte download store and subscription-based digital locker service as part of the much mooted new Google Music platform. There has been much speculation as to what exactly a gTunes service might offer – ie downloading, streaming or storage? Billboard says it has spoken to label insiders who are familiar with the licensing talks between the majors and the web giant.
According to those sources, Google would charge about $25 a year for punters to upload their digital music collections to their servers, meaning users could play their music from any net-connected device. A conventional iTunes style download store would sit alongside that service, allowing users to add tracks to their locker without leaving the Google platform.
The download store would also offer one-time-only full-track previews of songs, rather than the 30 second clips iTunes offer. That might suggest some sort of social networking/recommendation functionality is also being planned. The big weakness of Apple’s new Ping social network recommendation thing (one of many weaknesses, according to some) is that if you are recommended a song by a friend you can’t actually preview it in full within the iTunes player.
A music service based primarily around a digital locker system would make sense for Google, as a user-friendly ‘cloud-based’ storage facility plays to their strengths. And while the concept of digital lockers has been around for well over ten years, and the idea of music-focused lockers isn’t new either, Google could be the right company to take such a service into the mainstream providing they can sort out licensing issues and make the service workable on most devices. Whether that would or could include iPhones remains to be seen.
