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Google Music: Beta the New Service that lets you Store, Stream and Download Music Online

Google in the middle of May, announced its first toe in the waters of digital music. They call it Google Music: Beta (funny how they made the beta status a part of the name of the service). Its supposed to be a music service where you upload, store and download music online. Which is all just fine; what you want to know is, do you care?

When the whole Google Music idea was first floated, people were given to understand that they could buy and download music online from Google, and store their purchases online to stream any time they wished. That isn’t really how it’s turned out. Google’s negotiations with the music labels have fallen through so completely that there is no talk anymore of what you can buy on Google. To be able to use their cloud music service, you need to have music on your PC already. And this can’t just be a bunch of MP3 tracks sitting in your My Music folder. You need to have it properly managed with iTunes. iTunes does come with some well-known limitations that Google’s Music service this trying to take care of.

The kind of limitations that iTunes is handicapped with can be pretty annoying. To begin with, things can’t move in and out of iTunes all that are readily. It always means to sync with your iPhone or iPod with a wire. If you don’t have an iPhone – if you use a smartphone by another company, you are stuck with using third-party apps to sync your PCs music library with the one on your phone. Google hasn’t so far made any music management software. But they will be addressing this shortcoming.

The reason you should be interested in Music:Beta is that it will take your music from your PC or your Android phone and store a full copy on the cloud. And then you can stream music whenever you choose. So is this going to be really useful in the real world? Consider this example. Let’s say that you are at the office and you’re working. You have iTunes on your office computer, but you don’t have any of your favorite tunes stored in the iTunes library here at the office. If you had Music:Beta, you would have access to all you music on Google’s cloud and you could download music online to listen to at any time.

So doesn’t Google have any kind of rules about copy protection? Well, so it does. Apple negotiated in 2009 to be allowed to drop all copy protection. Any song downloaded from iTunes before then unfortunately, still has copy protection. You’ll be able to upload anything to Google’s cloud that you bought before Apple took away the copy protection. There are a few roundabout hacks to get rid of the copy protection. You could for instance, burn all your copy-protected music onto a DVD and then import it all back into iTunes. Membership to Google Music as of now is by invitation only.

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