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Health & Fitness

Google Music Beta: iTunes Killer?

Google is now offering a new music streaming service. I go on the inside to see what the hype is all about.

It’s no hidden secret:  I heart Google!  So when the search giant announced its Music beta initiative, I got excited.  Since January of this year, there have been many people questioning the possibility of a Google music service. The time has come, so let me give you some details!

Not very long ago, at Google I/O, the official announcement came for the music service. It was announced that the service would be offered free of charge while in beta. Initially, invitations would be offered to Motorola Xoom tablet users. Thankfully, I’m a Xoom user and I received my invite! After I walked through the initial screens to accept my invite, I was asked to download a piece of software to assist with the uploading of my music to the service. So basically I was being asked to upload my entire music collection to the cloud – all 6,700 songs! In this respect, the Music beta is similar to the Amazon Cloud Drive service, except, at this point, there is no limitation on the amount of storage you may use.

Now that I had some music uploaded to my account, it was time to try it out. It appeared that all of the album art showed up correctly. I selected a few songs and let them play. The streaming music sounded great and was instantaneous. I then selected a song and tried the “Make instant mix” option, which would be similar to the iTunes Genius option. BAM. No problem. I tried some searches of my music collection which would auto populate with possible selections. Very powerful. For my last trick, I downloaded the Music beta app to my Android phone. Flawless. My playlists showed up and I was able to see all of my music. Streaming on my Android phone was great. No breaks in the music at all. So how about some pros and cons?

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The feature I like the best was the ability to make songs available offline on my phone. This way I have the option if I don’t want to stream, say for instance, if I was on an airplane. The songs download locally to your Android device. I can have my songs without using every gigabyte of space on my phone. Take that iPhone! My least liked feature is that you have the option to “Shop this artist” from any song. Since Google doesn’t have rights to sell music as of yet, you are taken to a Google search that list places to purchase the music from. Kind of weak in my opinion. Also, having to upload my entire music collection to the cloud was not my idea of a good time, but necessary unfortunately.

Overall, I really enjoy the Music beta service and know that this is only the starting point for this offering. This first iteration is very basic, but gets the job done. I am able to stream my music from anywhere via a web browser, or on any Android device, phone or tablet. That’s pretty powerful when you think about it.  As time moves on, I’m sure many features will be added.

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So is Google Music beta an iTunes killer? No, not at this point. When compared to iTunes, Music beta is a very light featured product as it sits today. Remember that iTunes is a product that you install on a computer where Music beta is a cloud service that you access via a web browser or Android device. There is a lot of talk about an Apple cloud music service in the near future. It will be interesting to see how that service compares to Music beta. Also I am curious to find out how much Google Music will cost once it comes out of beta, and how that cost will compare to Apple’s cloud service. Until then, I will stream free of charge while I can!

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