Google Music for Android now official. Music app updated now available

May 10, 2011 | by Andrew Kameka

Google Music lives. After keeping android phone owners on the edge of their keyboards for nearly a year, Google has finally confirmed that its cloud-based music streaming service will launch soon in the United States.

Paul Joyce confirmed that Music Beta by Google will offer a cloud storage option that streams music to the desktop, Android phones, and tablets. For a limited time, members will have a free personal storage locker to upload up to 20,000 to their music collection. Those songs are then available to stream or sync for offline use, which is very similar to the Amazon Cloud Player launched recently.

A Windows or Mac companion app will add upload to a user’s song collection to Music Beta. The app even supports playlists, counts, and ratings from an existing iTunes account, and there’s an “Instant Mix” feature that creates on-the-fly playlists that finds similar tracks to a song that you want to hear now. The interface is well done and resembles the leaked music app that suddenly began syncing music to the cloud a few weeks ago. Best of all, it’s all synced to a Google account, so users will be able to get a new phone and instantly have their music collection ready.

The key difference between Google Music and Amazon Cloud is that Google Music does not sell music to members. Amazon’s service enables the purchase of songs and then makes every purchase automatically available to customers. Google doesn’t include a storefront in its music service, because it was unable to reach a deal with the major record labels. Continued rumors suggest that Google held back launching Music because of the lack of licensing deals, but the company has decided to launch a product now to attract users, and then hope to sell music directly through an update.

UPDATE: At a post-keynote press conference, Jaime Rosenberg, Director of Digital Content for Android confirmed rumors.

Unfortunately, a couple of major labels only wanted to [sell music through us] at terms that were unreasonable…the majority of the [music] industry sees what we’re trying to do and are very excited by the possibilities of what we showed you today…What we launched today is a completely legal service. in the same way you might move your collection to a portable mP3 player or a backup hard drive.

U.S. Android users can request a Google Music invite here. Also worth note, the Google Music app has been updated and is available now for Android 2.2.

Google I/O, Google Music, I/O 2011, music, music apps, streaming, streaming music

3 Comments

Duce said: On May 18, 2011

what happened to Google Shopper app for droids? How about the old version? The new version was not only broken but vanished!

oshizo said: On May 20, 2011

huh i saw it just yesterday and downloaded it.. Anyways i'm excited about this new music app. I'll be using both Google and Amazon. That way i'll have this stuff stored in multiple places as well as my home pc.

samandiriel said: On June 17, 2011

I actually wasn't much impressed with Google Music Beta after I got my invite and set up today and tried it out; it's pretty limited.

I’ve also been trying out Subsonic for the last couple weeks while waiting for my Google Music invite, and I’ve been pretty impressed by that. You run it on your own computer instead of in Google's cloud, and it’s got Google Music totally beat in my opinion. You can stream your tunes (and video!) to any computer browser or media player you like, and there is a media player app for Android, iPhone and Blackberry. Plus, you can have as many of your friends as you like share your tunes, and you can stream to as many devices as you like simultaneously (with Google Music you can only stream to one at a time).

I wrote up a pretty thorough comparison of the two if you’re interested: http://www.nirdvana.com/2011/06/16/google-music-b…
My recent post Google Music Beta Impressions

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