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Google Music Goes Live With Google+ Integration
angry tapir writes "Google Music, the company's cloud-based online music service, is now available to all users in the US and includes song and album sales, as well as an integration with the Google+ social networking site. Introduced in test form and by invitation only in May as a cloud-based song storage and playback service, Google Music will also let users buy albums and songs from all major music labels, except Warner."
The collection is impressive, as is the freedom (yes, it will also work with iOS devices), along with integration with Android.
I have two sources for digital music - Amazon mp3 and now Google Music (not counting other channels). More choices, more competition.
And good to see a better alternative to itunes (yuk!).
(Now get on with your Google hate - that's the flavor of the month here on slashdot these days)
*Sigh*. Yet another fantastic music service not available in my country.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's why they finally rolled out + access to those of us that use Google Apps, they were about to launch a service requiring money!
Have you used it? iTunes requires a horribly bloated app installed on your computer and clunky syncing of music between said computer and your iOS device. Google music needs none of this (with the exception of a small app to upload your music you already have to the cloud). I have all 12,500 songs in my collection available to me wherever I am, no need to pick and choose what music to take with me. It was Google took us to the post PC world that Jobs kept pontificating about.
When Google will spread the service globally?
iTunes requires a horribly bloated app installed on your computer and clunky syncing of music between said computer and your iOS device.
No, currently you download music anywhere and all your devices have access to that music at once, wherever they are... you see all the playlists from any device, if a song is not stored locally then you can simply ask to download it.
Some of that is made better with Match, since it will upload and store for you songs not in iTunes.
I'm not sure Google's music offering could really be more pleasant to use than this... It's great that they have this as an alternative but they are just basically barley keeping up with Apple at this point. Do they even have the same deal where they will make any of your ripped songs available over the cloud also?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
iTunes Match does, yes. And tracks with under 256kbps that exist in the iTunes store are replaced with 256kbps AAC versions.
Does iTunes let you upload, store and stream your own music?
ITunes with Match does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google Music will also let users buy albums and songs from all major music labels, except Warner.
Will they let users buy albums and songs from other Google+ users who record their own albums and songs?
Last I checked, pirating music was way easier than buying it legitimately and no one cares which country you are in. Could the music industry, just perhaps, stop being a joke?
Spotify, Amazon mp3, Google music; all not available in Australia. iTunes charging so much that it's usually cheaper to buy the physical CD from America and have it shipped across the friggin' ocean. Well, at least there's Grooveshark ... until SOPA closes it down.
Please explain why you assume it must require Flash? Baseless assumptions.
The audio format is mp3 @ 320kbps. Wrong again.
iTunes requires a horribly bloated app installed on your computer and clunky syncing of music between said computer and your iOS device.
Google music needs none of this (with the exception of a small app to upload your music you already have to the cloud).
It's not really a comparison you can make. iTunes does more than upload music into the cloud so I'm not sure how you arrived at "bloated". I'd list everything it could do but I'd sound like a cheerleader and I'm not sure it would make a difference. I'll just leave it at it's a dessert topping and a floor wax.
I really don't get the enormous amount of new music services that have arrived the last few years. Doesn't everybody who cares about music have his favorite stuff on his computer & phone already? What's the use of yet another service that plays everything you already have on all of your devices already?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Poor codec? You can tell the difference between an mp3 encoded at 320 and whatever hypothetical other codec you seem to think isn't "poor"? Bull.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
This whole thread seems like "Super Smash Bros., Cloud Music Edition".
Google Fanbois versus Apple Fanbois.... FIGHT!
#DeleteChrome
That would be a success, but it's actually $0.99 - $1.29 per song.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
But it still makes no sense to use MP3 in this day and age. If it's quality you're after, why don't go lossless and enjoy perfect quality? Yet if it's efficient use of bandwith you're after, why not use a codec that actually manages to get the best sounding music in the least amount of bits? I still fail to see how the choice of MP3 at 320 kbps is anything but, like I said, worse of both worlds.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
A lot of people have missed one of the most important things about this announcement. Indie musicians, without a label, can sign up, sell their music, and keep 70% of the sales revenue.
For years, we've bemoaned the RIAA and the giant labels for screwing artists out of their fair share. They're parasites controlling the distribution channels and deciding what pop-artist of the year they'll be pushing down our throats. Artists are lucky to get into the double digit percentage of sales revenue for their music, instead of pennies for a $20 disk.
If a talented indie artist or band can put their music on Google Music and get comparable exposure to the artists pushed and promoted by the large labels, it will drastically change the dynamics of the artist/label relationship. Evaluation of music by merit instead of marketing might. There will be a viable way to make a living without signing over one's soul and rights to a label.
This cuts out the traditional middle men in the music production process, and that's what terrifies the RIAA.
Google has the money to buy out the major labels, but instead of doing that, they made a very shrewd strategic decision to instead use the advances in technology to democratize music distribution. That's big, and that shouldn't be underestimated.
Do you have to download the song then listen or does it start streaming as soon as you click it like Google Music?
You can do either - if you just click on it, it will start playing. Or there is also a "cloud" icon for any song not on the device, that you can opt to download it to your device and have it for times you don't have network access.
If you swipe to delete a song from the device then it gets deleted locally and returns the song to "cloud" status.
Also, does this service cost money or is it free like Google Music?
iCloud is free, and does what I mentioned for any song that you have bought through iTunes using your account.
What is not free is Match. That takes any songs you have not bought through iTunes, uploads it into iCloud, and then from there you can access it anywhere just like any other iTunes purchased song. That costs $25/year I believe, if you quit all it should mean is your ripped songs are not backed up in iCloud for easy access.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Probably portability. MP3 works in most any player whereas AAC doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm still resisting buying digital music until they start selling in a lossless format like flac. For some reason no major stores are willing to do this. I want my high quality archive copy damn it!
"well, sadly i'm currently 280 songs over the 20k limit for Google Music. i feel like i first did way back when i realized it wouldn't all fit on my 64GB iPod. something about the completionist/archivist in me just doesn't want to bother uploading anything if i can't have it all."
This is a quote from a person who has his own successful band and who also designs and builds websites for bands more successful than his, using Drupal. Most of them are so done up you can't detect the Drupal in them. You've heard of the bands whose sites he does, but if I told you, that would be outing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Google should have a 99 cent album each day.
Well on Windows it has a couple of services running in the background whether it's running or not (presumably to provide the "launch iTunes when you connect your iDevice" functionality, amongst other things), requires Quicktime and tends to try to bring Safari along for the party, so in that sense it's bloated when all *I* wanted it for was to get music onto my iPod.
Sure, it does a lot more, but if you don't want those features then *to you* they're just bloat.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
...if Facebook has shown us anything, it's that people love to "share", as in "inundate us incessantly with all the things they 'like'", be that snapshots, links, friends, etc. People also love to share their music. No, not as in file sharing, but rather as in "Dude, I love this song. Let me crank it up for you..." Couple those to phenomenon on one technology platform and see the wave that will finally sweep RIAA's vision of music distribution away for good.
Perhaps it's not a fair comparison, but I agree that iTunes is terrible. I would suspect that the "bloated" allegation came about because it's a bit like Microsoft Word - it could be a simple, fast, easy to use word processor, but it has thousands of features when most people only ever use a very small subset of core functionality.
Same with iTunes. My main complaints are that it's slow as molasses, and is horribly clunky. In contrast to the "it just works" philosophy, iTunes doesn't. Example: our devices have been registered to three computers over the years. You're only allowed five. I'm only using one of those computers, but I can't unregister the other two because they both died. How do I tell iTunes this? Beats me.
The simplest operations are far too complicated, it doesn't follow any standards for usability, and so hardly anything works the way I expect it to work. Half the time I can't even figure out how to do what I want and I end up giving up. Connecting multiple devices is a nightmare. Multiple Apple store accounts on the same computer? Worse than being eaten by zombies. It...just...doesn't...work.