So I’m confused, I thought music stores like iTunes were a thing of the past with that streaming business, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is planning an online music store to compete with Apple and Amazon.
According to the article, the 4 major music companies (Vivendi/Universal Music, Sony, Warner, EMI ) are in talks to license their catalogs to Google, and only EMI is close to a deal.
But Google’s Music Beta will actually be a combination between retail sales and music storage, just like the clouds of Amazon. I never realized it but there is already a Google cloud music service with limited capabilities and which lets people back up their songs and stream them to phones.
This is something Apple is trying to beat, as the company has secured licenses from the 4 major music companies ‘that will let its users create remotely accessible online-music libraries without going through a time-consuming uploading process’ according to the WSJ.
With Apple, iTunes Match will directly link a user’s song to Apple’s master collection, with an unlicensed service, users will have to upload the music they want to store online. That’s why Google is trying to get these licenses!!
So who is going to win in this battle? According to a New York Times blog, ‘Google may be hoping to announce its store before Apple opens its latest cloud music program, iTunes Match, which was unveiled in June and is expected to be operational by the end of October’, this means in a couple of weeks?