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Google Launching Music Service Without Labels
fysdt writes "Google Inc is set to launch an online music locker service to allow users to store and access their songs wherever they are, similar to one launched by Amazon.com Inc in March. And like the Amazon Cloud Drive player, Google music service is being introduced on Tuesday without any prior licensing deals with major music labels, following months of fruitless negotiations."
from old media, over me accessing songs I own from wherever I am, or any device I have.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
I hear Apple already has a music service. They're calling it "iTunes". It'll never catch on, I'm sure!
Apologies for this expression I just Googled it and regret my wording.
Just meant to imply it would be a massive orgy of corporate interests and expensive litigation.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Presumably they have a legal opinion that they don't need a license to do this. In the US, fair use says you can copy your owned music to other media. That's not true in all countries.
How so? Fragmentation didn't work out well for them in the past, remember when they had a 90+% hold on the PC market? They have what now? 5~%? After Amiga, Commodore and IBM and the rest fractured the market.
Can other people see my music?
Then how will the RIAA know what I have there, what is the basis for the subpoena?
Except that Google has the wherewithal to buy the music industry outright. The RIAA would actually have to sue and win (as opposed to litigating a smaller opponent into bankruptcy), which might be rather difficult, seeing as how these cloud-storage services merely give users the ability to store their own files for later retrieval and don't really facilitate piracy.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
From the system requirements : "The latest version of Adobe Flash Player must be installed and enabled in your browser (Flash is included with Google Chrome)."
So it's going to be a non-starter for a lot of devices including of course iOS devices but a lot of others too. So right of the bat they go out of their way to alienate literally millions of potential users. Not a good way to dive into a market that has a lot of big players going into it including Amazon and potentially Apple who are rumored, as they always are, to be working on something similar.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Because cloud computing is the future!!!! Buy into their marketing and buzzwords or be left behind!
Google has been negotiating with the music publishers and the negotiations were described as "fruitless." This can only mean that the music industry wanted payment for every time a user plays music that he already paid for and Google didn't want to allow it.
So, in the end, we will see this service become popular and the industry will challenge this in court initially seeking injunctive relief and eventually "performance royalties" among other damages.
I, of course, anxiously await the legal tangle. Google is a hero for many here on Slashdot for various reasons. I still see them as a marketing company with their own angle and interests at heart, but I do appreciate the fact they are willing to fight for their cause rather than simply roll over and pay people just to stay out of court.
You're overestimating the music industry; while I'm sure that no one wants a long, drawn out lawsuit, Google sees about twice as much revenue than the entire recording industry*. (Plus, they've got a business model that doesn't revolve around suing their users.) I'm not sure that the RIAA's lawyers would be too eager to sue Google; it's easy to arm-twist a $2000 settlement out of a college kid, and if one or two of them do end up going to court, the RIAA can certainly outlast any private individual. However, suing someone bigger than you, who has an experienced in-house legal team, is a whole different ballgame.
* Gotta back up my claims. For the sake of this argument, "the record industry" doesn't contain indie labels; they are too fragmented to coordinate their power. That leaves us with:
Sony Music Entertainment: $1.33 billion
Universal Music Group: $6.14 billion
Warner Music Group: $3.49 billion
EMI: $1.65 billion
versus
Google: $29.32 billion
(all values USD, anual revenue, as listed on Wikipedia)
Sure, if by "worldwide" you mean UK, France, Germany, Austrialia, Germany.
Google is a US company that offers all of their services in the US and only search, maps, and mail outside the US. They do offer some extra services to other countries, especially UK, but they don't really care about the rest of the world.
It's a shame, but that's how it works for us non-Americans. Especially people from the third world like myself. I'm tired of getting snail-mail spam from google, for $50 worth of Adsense, and not be able to get, say, Google Voice. Or Local (even though google really wants my location in my android phone). Or any other service really.
Sure, they claim there are licensing issues, local laws, etc. That's all bullshit. It's simple: they're US based, and the US market is so big there is no need to expand to the rest of the world.
I don't expect to see this service enabled for any country south of the equator, except Australia.
It sounded like Google was able to secure licensing deals from several labels, they specifically called out independent labels as being easy to work with, but it sounds like Sony and Universal refused to come to terms.
Clearly, this is not the music service Google wanted to offer. And Google director of content partnerships Zahavah Levine -- who led the company's negotiations with the major labels -- made it clear who she feels is to blame.
"We've been in negotiations with the industry for a different set of features, with mixed results," she told Billboard the night before the announcement was made. "[But] a couple of major labels were less focused on innovation and more on demanding unreasonable and unsustainable business terms."
Sources tell Billboard that Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group proved the bottlenecks in this case. Google wanted to offer a scan-and-match style locker service -- where instead of uploading different copies of the same track to store in a locker for each users, the service would scan users' libraries and match the songs they own to a centralized server, paying rightsholders for each stream. Without the rights to do so, the message from Google is clear -- either get on board or we'll move on without you.
"A large segment of the music industry worked cooperatively and was extremely helpful sorting out the issues of online licensing," she said, giving particular credit to the independent label and publishing communities.
But the same article also explicitly says they're launching without any licensing deals at all. It looks like Sony and Universal torpedoed the boat for everyone.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Can other people see my music?
Then how will the RIAA know what I have there, what is the basis for the subpoena?
Also, how will the RIAA know when you obtained the pirated music? The statute of limitations clock in many cases is pinned to the last infringing act - so not only would they have to prove you had the files and obtained the music files through copyright infringement, they would have to prove that they were still inside the statute of limitations (three years for civil suits, five for criminal), which means proving you downloaded the music or shared it with someone else during a specific period of time.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
+1
I'm not sure what interaction benefit the 'click to open parent' gives. If you click a link on an already visible post, it may or may not follow the link. Or it might do some silly un-collapsing thing.
If you look at the Amazon EULA it squarely transfers the liability to the customer. One would assume Google would do the same thing. The customer attests they have the legal right to store and stream the music in "teh Cloud".
Unfortunately, wrapping the brainfuck implementation of DoomII into an mp3 produces a dark eldritch chant that, upon playing in a dark room under a full moon, summons Cthulhu and ushers in an age of despair for 100 years. Plus or minus some if you use a bit rate less then 128.
Google has a ticket open.
Where's MP3.com right now? They tried this 10 years ago, and got shot down in court. What's different now?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Marvelous. Buying the law.
The future of music, with music labels crushed and Google dictating how musicians are paid, is bright.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The parent companies are bigger. That may seem like small difference,but Google and Amazon can afford 10 years of litigation. MP3.com couldn't.
Where's MP3.com right now? They tried this 10 years ago, and got shot down in court. What's different now?
I think the difference is that Google has unlimited money for legal defense.
As opposed to the present, with the public being crushed and the labels dictating how musicians are paid?
they don't really care about the rest of the world.
Since you have access to search, you can find their SEC filings: Half of their revenue is from outside the USA.
The rest of the world is where the real competitors and the real growth opportunities are. Google can't grow much in search/ads (i.e. make more money) in the USA, because they already have most of the market that would use them. In Russia, there is lots of money to be made by out-competing Yandex. Yahoo Japan has plenty of market-share, and Google is not stupid enough to not improve search to try and win over their users.
Sure, they claim there are licensing issues, local laws, etc. That's all bullshit.
It's simple: they're US based, and the US market is so big there is no need to expand to the rest of the world.
Evidence-free name-calling rarely leads to enlightenment.
There is nothing simple about building web apps that comply with local regulations in all the locals of the world. Try it yourself if you disagree :)
I don't expect to see this service enabled for any country south of the equator, except Australia.
Orkut is developed for Brazil (and India), with the USA and Europe as an afterthought.
triple annoying when said behavior ALSO SCROLLS YOU TO THE TOP OF THE FUCKING THREAD and applies to clicks INSIDE A FUCKING EDIT BOX in which you're' composing a reply, causing it to scroll about a light-year below the bottom of the screen with every click
That's another key difference. 90%+ of potential customers today are already using iTunes, so Amazon/Google/etc. has to convince people to leave all the music that they may have purchased in a protected format behind, and start over with them.
Are you sure about that 90% figure? I know lots of people that don't use iTunes.
I for one would love to have an online music service that lets me upload my (large) existing collection of CD's (preferably with a "virtual" upload so I don't have to actually transfer the same bits to google that they already have), *and* that lets me play it through a Roku type appliance (Google TV?) through my TV sound system, as well as my Android phone. Ideally, I'll also have access to my music through my 3G (LTE?) enabled car stereo at some point, though for now I'm content to connect my phone to my car speakers.
Until used CD's stop costing more than digital music (~ $5 including shipping, versus $9), I'll keep buying CD's and will want a solution that let's me play them on various devices.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. You're right, of course, about the recording industry being willing to throw a higher percentage of their revenue towards lawsuits than Google; however, I don't think Google's going to just back down on this one. They are heavily invested in seeing "the cloud" take off, and a music locker is an important first step towards not only the technical aspect of this, but also the more-difficult behavior-shifting aspect of it. Google wants to kill your PC, replace it with an Andriod, and shift all of the heavy-lifting (storage, processing, etc.) to their cloud servers. If they can convince the average user that it's easier/more beneficial to store their music in a locker and stream it on-demand, they're taking a big first-step towards that goal.
While the recording industry is going to piss and moan about what Google's doing here, I'd be astonished if Google was doing anything outright illegal. They're not stupid; they've got their own lawyers looking over their shoulders. The deals that Google failed to produce were more in line with offering new content for purchase, rather than the rights to stream music that a user already has legitimate rights to.
Or how many new people can be brought into the market. I never used iTunes because I didn't to have anything to do with Apple. But I'd give those others a look.
There was an old system for vinyl - some sort of hidden signal in the audio which would be detected by complient tape recorders and cause them to cease recording. It failed because there was no means by which the labels could compel tape recorder manufacturers to detect and respect the 'do not record' instruction. Impressively designed, as it was all done using only analog filters. No cheap DSP in those days!
Apple are PC's, So were all their competitors, Amiga, Commodore, IBM, and the countless "IBM Clone" Manufacturers sure as heck where not unified. IBM Won that War, because they did NOT try to use legislation to kill clones of their hardware, like Apples does.
They need to learn the lesson MS learned, its better to have the whole world running your software(or hardware) and only have 5% pay you. Then only control 5% of the market and 100% of those people pay you.
It has a favorable side effect of making your product a household name, and opens up business use. It makes your product the "Standard" that everything else is measured up against. Its why alot refer to Apple PC's as Fisher Price PC's, because when compared to an equally cost point PC, they do look like a Fisher Price toy in comparison.
If Apple had kept a hold on their 90% share, we may have ended up in a world were MS was the trendy hipster thing to own, while Apple is for the real world. Instead of the opposite we have today.
>>>remember when they had a 90+% hold on the PC market? ...Amiga, Commodore and IBM and the rest fractured the market.
There was never a time when Apple held that high share. The #1 selling computer of the late 1970s was the Tandy-Randy Shack 80 (TRS-80). In 1982 Atari 400/800 briefly held the crown. From 1983-86 the Commodore 64 dominated the market. And then finally the IBM PC/clones (1987 to present).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
On the funny side, Sony already has a precedent that storing data online is not safe. So they may argue that the music files are not safe and prone to be stolen.
Than again, I'll laugh for several minutes when Google shows them how to actually protect on-line content.
I'm repeated surprised by how I'll say something like "Google will control X!" and people do not immediately disagree, saying "Google won't control X!"
No, they immediately accept my frame and then actively defend the idea of a multi-billion dollar advertising company controlling content, and how this is the the right and true and good outcome, and how we'll all be so much happier when the company that records our searches and history, maps our location and snoops our wifi makes it impossible for anybody to ever do recorded music as their day job.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If DJs use poor-quality encodes of tracks in your world, I don't want to live there.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
After Amiga, Commodore and IBM and the rest fractured the market.
Amiga was a Commodore product. Perhaps you meant Atari?
Apple are PC's, So were all their competitors
At the time, practically everything had a different CPU, so the whole PC or non-PC is irrelevant until several years later. At that point in time, Apple was not a "PC" by the terms of geniuses who think a CPU architecture determines whether something is a Personal Computer, because a "PC" used x86, and Apple was using PPC CPUs. In fact, I'm pretty sure IBM was their major supplier of CPUs for a while. Regardless, all these occurrences are separated by years, and probably shouldn't be thrown together into one argument.
No, I'm talking about market share, Apple was the defacto PC back then. Yes I'm talking about a time when upgrading RAM required a soldering iron, and the only platform DOS ran on was an Apple. Kids these days.
There isn't any useful president from the mp3.com case because a "music locker" requires that people rip & upload the songs themselves, meaning it'll go into a long legal fight, and google has far more money than the labels.
In fact, if any label gets too uppity, google can simply buy them outright or coerce their owners. Warner Music's entire market cap is only $1.22B, meaning google could easily just buy them outright and terminate the upper management, legal team, etc. All the others are small subsidiaries inside much large companies that might see little benefit in tangling with Google.
I doubt EMI's owner Citigroup would tangle with Google, even though their market cap is 129B. Any bank likes keeping rich people happy. If they did, I'm sure google could launch a hedge fund to poach Citigroup's best quantitative analysis, then let the rest of the financial industry eat them alive. Sony and Vivendi (UMG) have market caps of 29B and 23B, respectively. I'd imagine their less vulnerable to talent poaching than Citigroup too, but you might still threaten some executive and board member positions by working through their larger stock holders.
A cheaper solution might just be threatening to provide lawyers for all the little people they've extorted money from by threatening to sue, a few $40k per year ambulance chasers could drag any label through thousands of expensive lawsuits for years.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
>>>Google dictating how musicians are paid
Welcome to the world 99% of the other wage-slaves have to deal with. Do you think WE get to tell our bosses how/when we wish to be paid? Of course not. The corporation dictates how laborers get paid, and there's no reason to think Musicians, Actors, Authors, etc should be any different. I figure in the future they'll all be paid by the Hour, rather than per sale.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Thats honestly the society you want to live in?
No, but it's the society I do live in.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I think the music on youtube and other video sites sounds just fine. Not CD quality, but better than the FM Radio I typically listen to.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"Marvelous. Buying the law.
The future of music, with music labels crushed and Google dictating how musicians are paid, is bright."
I really don't understand how you got from Point a to point b?
How will this crush the music labels? Or even effect them at all?
I buy my music from Amazons MP3 store or I buy a CD. So the label and artist are paid. I rip my CDs and put them on my phone and my ipod touch now. Which is all fine since I have paid for the music. Now I can copy them to Google so I do not have worry about keeping everything synced. So why does Google ore better yet why do I have to get any type of permission to store my music files someplace for me to listen to them. How exactly is this any differn't from a thumb drive or dropbox?
I would love to know why this really has anything to do with music labels at all?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Of course, anywhere Apple or Google goes, Microsoft has to follow. Poorly. Many of the most brilliant minds in the industry work at Microsoft. Too bad the upper management has a bad case of Apple/Google Envy and spends all their time chasing the latest shiny object instead of defining the future of computing.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The inevitable legal battles are going to be hilarious when defense lawyers start forcing RIAA et al to pick apart the exact technical differences between local and remote playback. In the end all playback is streaming, whether it's from a local hard drive or a remote locker.
So it's ok to stream from a local hard drive but not a remote one? Why? Is it a protocol issue? What protocols are ok? If streaming over SATA is ok, would it be ok if Amazon strung a SATA cable from their hard drive to my house? What about SATA over USB? What if I encapsulate SATA in TCP/IP, is that ok? If yes then why not HTTP? RTSP? Custom protocol? They're going to have to nail down exactly what is and isn't acceptable and the answer will be ridiculous.
For deduping, they don't seem to like bypassing hashing, Dropbox style. What about other hashing methods? What if the user uploads the data and it's deduped by the server? If that's no good, what about filesystem-level deduping? Filesystems can easily make it seem like blocks are duplicated when in fact they are not. Is it illegal to store an MP3 on such filesystems?
Fun times ahead folks :D
man, sucks to be you
People, what a bunch of bastards
We're sorry. Music Beta is currently only available in the United States.
Looks like I'll have to continue relying on The Pirate Bay for my music.
Actually, I'm kidding. Everything on my computer is legal, from the OS (Kubuntu) to every last file. Abstinence has been working fine for me.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
In Soviet Russia, the joke gives YOU up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah its not like Microsoft continues to create a stream of some of the richest people on the planet...
"His name was James Damore."
Yes, because attaching yourself to the money train like some cambrian leech is the mark of genius.
I'd rather actually achieve something meaningful with my life. I never said Microsoft was unprofitable, just that it's products and achievements are lackluster and uninspiring. Brilliant people (usually) want to do brilliant, visionary, and new things. That hasn't been happening at Microsoft in...well, ever really. There's a few projects you could argue aimed for that, but I can't think of any that achieved it. Unless you count Machiavellian business deals, but we were talking about the tech people, not the MBAs.
You do realize that all of those companies are owned by much larger parent companies don't you?