Google worked for a long time to get a music store/service up and running with the blessing of the big music labels. Last spring, all of that broke down, so Google launchaed a cloud-based music locker on its own.
Click Image To Enlarge
But Google is finally close to launching a music service with help from the labels, Andy Rubin, Senior Vice-President of Mobile at Google said today, confirming earlier reports for the first time. When?
“I think we’re close.”
Rubin said onstage at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong.
Both Amazon and Apple already sell music and offer cloud lockers, but Rubin promised that Google’s version “will have a little twist – it will have a little Google in it. It won’t just be selling 99-cent tracks.”
Still, Google needs all of the big labels on board, and the most recent reports said only EMI Music was close to a final deal. So, “close” could be a relative term.
Meanwhile, about those earlier label deals. Why did they fall apart, anyway?
Rather than accuse the labels of taking an unreasonable stance, as Google executives have previously done, Rubin takes a new tack — he says media companies in general haven’t been able to figure out what Google is up to. Just like Steve Jobs’s company used to be called “Apple Computer” and evolved into “Apple,” he says, Google is morphing, as well.
He said.
“Google is in the very, very early phases of adding consumer products to our portfolio. The media industry didn’t see us as that. They saw us a search company.”
You can connect some dots here and make an educated guess: Rubin is probably referencing media companies’ insistence that Google help them fight piracy by making some sites harder to find. And the search giant has complied, to some degree. But there’s likely more to the story than that.
COMMENTARY: I blame Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO for not having the skills to properly communicate the vision of Google as a company. This created confusion and possibly mistrust among not only music company executives, but the same thing happened with film and television producers. The latter was the biggest reason why Google TV has been such a dismal failure. Besides the lack of support from the film and TV studios, Google TV's controller was also poorly designed and not very user-friendly.
Let's hope that Google is able to create a great music user experience with the applications software that will make it easy for Google users to store and download music files easily and seamlessly throughout a broad spectrum of mobile and desktop devices. Apple's iCloud and iTunes work in harmony and music is synchronized among devices simultaneously. If Google Music Store can do the same thing, then they might have an albeit, very slight chance of succeeding.
With the possible exception of Android OS for mobile devices and the new Google+ social network, Google is known for a "lot of fast talking", but very poor execution and under-delivering. When Rubin says that the Google Music Store in the cloud will have a "Google twist" what precisely is he talking about. Will it work within the Google search engine, perhaps? That might definitely work to its advantage, like YouTube has.
Courtesy of an article dated October 19, 2011 appearing in All Things Digital
Comments