As The Cloud Descends, Can Google Music Beta Make it Rain?

Yesterday Google announced Music Beta. It's essentially a service that allows to you upload your personal music collection to the cloud so you can stream it anywhere on any device when you please; keeping the media and accompanying playlists centralised and synced to your devices.

Color me fascinated. But what’s the deal?

Google says that you'll still be able to play your most recently played songs, but I think everybody who owns an MP3 player knows that you probably don't want to hear the song you've just listened to, you want to listen to new things from your large music collection. I think Google kind of realised this and enables you to make specific albums or playlists available for offline-mode.

Of course a new online-music service wouldn't be worth its weight in code without some kind of algorithm to help people listen to music that suits their mood.
Music Beta will help you create playlists that suit your mood, based on yours and others’ listening behavior.

Personally I think this isn't necessarily a good thing, if it's based on what everybody else is doing, it will come up with generic pop-playlists while dedicated music lovers have very refined tastes in specific non-standard genres.

In fact, a lot of people like to discover new music as in with Last.fm or Pandora. Things that aren't in your library/collection are presented to you based on what you've listened to in the past. You can listen to the tracks in full and get all the relevant artist information so you might can add new music to your collection.

Ghostly Discovery for instance has a very nice mood-based approach, it lets you discover new music with their app Ghostly Discovery by simply dialing in your mood, preferred tempo and if you want a digital or organic feel. Though it's currently limited to the catalog of the Ghostly label, it's a great start and I hope they will expand their service to other libraries in the future.

Google also allows you to upload your entire iTunes music collection with ease. Anything you buy or add in the future can be synced to your Google Music cloud.

People are able to upload 20,000 songs to their cloud. Correct me if I'm wrong here but It's not clear who owns the files after they're uploaded. The question is: will it be "your cloud" only, or will those songs eventually be available everywhere to anybody else? The latter could be the greatest copyright failure since online file sharing.

When you see the words "Music" and "Cloud" you think of SoundCloud right? The biggest online music service for musicians, producers, DJs and anybody who produces sounds at all. It’s now a vivid community of creative people that share their own music and discover other's work and get in touch with them. However, it seems that Google is aiming solely at streaming music you already own and they don’t state anything specific about being able to buy music online or uploading your own created music for others to listen to.

At this time the service is only available in the U.S. and is accessible via (drum roll) invitation. I hope this doesn't get over hyped because of the invite-based model, only to wind up a “service” like Google Wave (R.I.P.) for example. When the service will be available in European countries and the rest of the world isn't clear.

Does Google simply want in on the music listening behavior statistics provided by users like Last.fm and iTune’s Genius do, or do they truly want to make it easier for users to enjoy music everywhere (which all mobile music players already did)? Well, the answer, more likely than not, is at least partially in the question.