Like we had reported a few hours ago, Google has officially taken covers off its latest service, the long rumored cloud music service. Called Music Beta By Google, the new service can be considered as an extended hard disk in the cloud for storing your music in the cloud and access it from any of your authorized Android laden devices. The service was announced in the sidelines of the Google I/O conference held at San Francisco earlier today.
The service lets users upload up to 20,000 songs in their personal cloud and access it using a browser or an Android based device from anywhere there is an Internet connection. Note that you would not be able to download your songs from the cloud – just pluck them and listen to whatever your choice is. The lucky 5000 odd folks who attended the conference were the first users on the planet, outside of Google employees to test the service. The Music Beta website is already live now and you will need invites to use the service. Also, you would need to be inside the US to be able to use it as of now. Note that Google will allow some amount of caching of songs so you can access some of the songs even while you are offline.
It was earlier thought that Google would introduce a much larger, broader service that would have also allowed people to purchase their music from Google. That however didn’t happen, mostly because of lack of all the carriers involved not arriving on a conclusion.With Apple planning to introduce its own cloud based iTunes service soon, it would be interesting to see how Google’s latest product manages to stay afloat amidst immense competition. iTunes would of course have the option to purchase music as well – unlike Google Music which is just a storage service.
Another important thing to be noticed is the fact that Google is offering this service for free “as of now”. This could soon evolve in to a paid model in the not too distant future it seems? What do you reckon?
