Posted by The Blogging Desk on Wed, May 11, 2011
This article originally appeared on Technorati.
It's finally here - Google Music Beta is official.
Amazon and Google have gone forward without the A-OK of the music labels and are allowing you to upload your music to their "cloud" for streaming. Excellent! I'm glad both companies will stick it to the labels. It seems like Google Music Beta won’t be letting in many users, though, so we’ll have to wait to be able to upload 20K songs into the cloud. Is that a good or bad thing?
What’s the difference between those and Apple's possible streaming service, though? Label support.
Apple is said to be in talks with labels about their own version of iTunes streaming and may even have their full support. What does that mean for you? For starters, it may mean you won’t have to wait a day and half uploading all of your music. Presumably, label support will mean that Apple’s servers can read over your library, and if it’s for sale in the iTunes store, that track will become instantly available to you for streaming - no upload necessary, your songs are tracked via your Apple ID, too.)
I’m willing to bet a large majority of the folks reading this don’t pay for their music, or have ripped a ton of CDs to their HDD. If Apple has indeed gotten labels on their side, you won’t have to worry about uploading a single track to their servers. They already have just about every song out there available for purchase inside of iTunes for sale.
Why bother having the user upload anything when they already have the track on hand? My bet is this will be the differentiator among the services. Your Apple ID will now know what files you have inside of iTunes and that info will then follow you around on all of your iOS devices and most likely a new web version of iTunes.
Can you imagine Steve Jobs uploading his iTunes collection to a server? Not me sir, not me.
