I’ve been beta testing Google Music for a little over a month and found it to be pretty good, although I still listen to most of my music through iTunes. Today Google had its public launch of its music purchase, storage and streaming service to compete with both Apple and Amazon. It has some very cool features such as being able to share purchases with circled friends on Google+ with free one-time listens (I immediately purchased “Get Happy” by Candye Kane for 99 cents and shared it on my Google+ page) as well as being able to access your entire library from any computer or Android device. The bad news is any music someone already owns must be uploaded to Google Music’s servers, which if someone has a large library can literally take days. New purchases through the Android Store are automatically added to your online library. Apple iTunes Match works much cleaner with songs in your library simply needing to match existing files already on their servers. Unmatched songs would need to be uploaded. But while Apple charges $25 per year to store and access 25,000 of your songs, Google offers 20,000 songs worth of storage and access for free. Also, every song on Google Music is at an amazing 320 Kbps for the same prices as Apple’s slightly less quality 256 Kbps songs. Where Google is going to knock everybody else out though will be with its Indy Artist Hub. Independent artists will now be able to upload their songs and albums and sell them directly from within Google Music, completely circumventing greedy music industry representatives, and be able to set their own prices and keep 70% of the profits. I immediately shot an email off to my musician brother to let him know. Google Music is going to be what Apple failed with Ping and what the Zune Marketplace never really got.
