‘Google Music’ is nearing its launch in U.S. and Google Inc. has already cracked deals with some of the major Music labels namely Sony Corp., Universal Music Group and EMI Group Ltd, in order to make the most of this launch.
However, this isn’t the very first attempt from Google in Online Music commerce as Google launched its ‘Music Beta’ service in May this year with limited features such as cloud storage for personal music library(up to 20000 songs) for free and ability to listen to songs from any device, be it tablet, PC or phone, even when the user is offline.
With today’s launch of ‘Google Music’, Google will enable its users to buy songs, directly from Google Music store and that will stand ‘Google Music’ in direct competition with Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s music services and fast rising music services such as Spotify.
Here are some of the major highlights of ‘Google Music’ service…
- An online music store to legally buy music from various artists and music labels at standard prices(such as $0.99)
- Auto-syncing of music libraries across multiple devices
- Enormous “free” music storage on the cloud
- Ability to listen to your favorite songs on any device (PC, tablet or Smartphone)
- No need of occupying your local hard disk for storing music and having any fear of losing your collection due to system crashing.
But here’s one simple question in everyone’s mind right now : Isn’t it too late for Google to make a dent in Online Music Industry ?
The music industry was first disrupted almost a decade back when Apple introduced iTunes to the world and forced the whole of Music Industry to adopt an unconventional model of selling music online through iTunes Store. And since then, the monopoly of Apple in Online Music Industry has remained unchallenged.
Spotify and Amazon Music store have tried to establish themselves in online Music Industry and despite them doing not too bad, Apple iTunes has remained the hotspot for online music purchases and related eco-system.
For Google to really make a dent in online music industry, the key challenge will be to push hundreds of millions of iTunes users to jump the ship and seek a new home for their music library and future music purchases at Google Music. That won’t be easy for sure but that looks the only way for Google to establish itself in already saturated online music industry.
To realize how challenging this task will be for Google, one can analyze the case of Amazon, which is already offering the same ‘music purchasing’ and storage facility, called ‘Cloud Drive’ to music fanatics.
Amazon, although being reasonably cheap compared to iTunes or iCloud service, is hardly causing any worry to Apple as people, who’re highly accustomed to buying music from iTunes for years now and playing them on iGadgets, are least bothered about Amazon Music Store.
Still, one can’t rule out Google’s unmatchable dominance over the web and the grip that it has over millions of users through plethora of free web services. Anyways, it’s not going to take much time for analysts to declare Google Music as yet another #fail or a runaway success, after Google Music launches to the public today.