Google Music for Android
The iTunes music store was an idea before its time when it first launched in April 2003, but trying to put tracks not purchased from Apple onto your iPod was a tedious process. If you weren’t at least a little bit tech-savvy, it could be nearly impossible. Eight years later, users can now import music downloaded from other sources onto their Apple devices almost effortlessly. So, when Google Music was rolled out last month, many asked, do we really need another online music store?
For some, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” According to Jason Gilbert of HuffPost Tech, for example, Google Music is a “first round knockout” over its successful and well-established competitor. In addition to being optimized for use on Android devices and providing access to “tons” of free songs available through Google’s fledgling music service, the most tangible benefit to subscribers is that it’s free. Whereas iTunes Match requires an annual fee of $24.99 to provide users with mobile access to their iTunes libraries, the Google music locker streams up to 20,000 songs directly to your Android device at no charge whatsoever. This seems amply sufficient for most libraries. Perhaps music aficionados have different stories to tell, but after eight years of iTunes, many of us still have fewer than 1,000 songs in our libraries. Additionally, iTunes Match is limited to ten separate devices, but because Google Music’s service is accessed directly through the subscriber’s web browser, there’s no limit on the number of devices on which your songs can be played.
There are, to be sure, arguments in favor of iTunes, but for the most part such arguments aren’t deal-breakers. Google Music is, for now, only available in the United States, but if it proves to be as successful as it hopes to be, we suspect it’s only a matter of time before it’s available everywhere. Also, Google Music takes days to upload a music library, a task that iTunes can manage in minutes … but you only have to do it once and it’s difficult to imagine why a music library might need to be uploaded urgently.
We’ll continue to follow developments with Google Music as they occur, but for now, it looks like a bright horizon for Android users.
