In a long expected announcement to bring music storage to the cloud, Google has launched a streaming music service.
Named “Music Beta by Google,” the service acts as a sort of “digital locker,” allowing users to store their music in the cloud rather than on personal hard drives or mobile devices.
Once you’ve uploaded your music library to a remote server, you can stream your music to your Android phone or web-connected PC. With an Internet connection, you can access your music wherever you go. Currently it’s free while in beta mode, with a max of 20,000 songs.
Like every music innovation, the labels are resisting Google’s service as they are with Amazon and are not ready to offer licensing terms.
Given that the words “download” and “streaming” are not defined in copyright law, the labels are positioning streaming as having a radio station, and downloading as almost synonymous with piracy.
What the labels are saying is: regardless of whether you have already paid for your music, you have only paid for one copy. If you want to listen to the music you paid for on different devices (or share a favorite track, God forbid) you gotta pay again.
I get the idea (encourage it, actually) that digital content is like a utility, like water or electricity – pay a small monthly fee, and let the technology sort out how to divvy up the pie amongst all the content creators.
Labels would prefer that everything is streamed (supports utility model) but we aren’t there yet, which is why they hate digital lockers – a lot of people will upload pirated content and stream that content to their devices.
Still, it feels like another step in the demise of the historic music label model.