Okay Geek Farm
Google Music Beta streams your entire music collection online
Ricardo Trejo
It was only a matter of time until someone finally decided to step up to Apple and its iTunes platform. During Google’s I/O conference, the search giant announced a new service dubbed Music Beta that won’t specifically be an iTunes clone, meaning it won’t offer an online music store, but it would rather be a dedicated music player that will cross over multiple computers, browsers, and Android devices, and stream your already existing music collection over the cloud. Excited?
Users will be able to upload a total of 20,000 onto the service, and cross sync them to their Android devices who have the Android Music App (available on the Android Marketplace) and are running firmware 2.2 and above. Songs and folders can be manually uploaded, or you can set it up so that any new music added onto your computer gets uploaded.
- Instant Mix, which is similar to iTunes’ Genius playlist feature, allows you to select a song and then build an automatic playlist from similar artists and songs based off the style from the original tune chosen.
- Playlists are magically synced across all your devices and computers, and as soon as music is uploaded all your devices have access to those songs for playing, or for temporary storage.
- Songs recently played will be available for offline listening pleasure, and if you know you won’t be near any internet access soon you can manually select which songs or aritsts you’d like to have available offline.
The beta is open for invitations only, while I/O conference attendees were given special access to the service early today. Music Beta is free for the moment but Google plans to unveil pricing at a later time.
Our thoughts
Google’s entry into the music business is no surprise to anyone who’s been following the news. They’ve been eyeing new ways to monetize their well known name outside of ads within search results, and perhaps having a paid subscription service for music-based cloud storage might be the ticket they’ve been waiting for. How this pressures Apple into making the next move will be interesting to watch, although it’s not much of a secret that ol’ man Jobs has something up his sleeve — what with Apple buying the doman iCloud.com being the dead give away.
Google Music Beta — Request an invitation here (US only)
