Google Music now available to everyone in the US
music.google.com
music.google.com
It kills me that Google, owner of Youtube, would not directly integrate Youtube and Google Music. I can only assume this is once again a limitation imposed by the RIAA. Sigh.
Of all the bone headed product decisions made at Google, the fact that Android owns Google Music makes me say "WHY?????"
Its not an RIAA limit (and somehow, you all extend much more power to the RIAA than they have in these matters). It's a Google endemic product org issue.
as someone else said they did announce youtube integration through artists hub as well as linking to purchasing the track from youtube. http://music.google.com/artists/ - at the bottom is screenshot of what it will be like.
What else would you do?
EDIT: Actually, the answer is kind of obvious now that I've pondered it a little bit. We can only hope that a deeper integration is in the pipeline.
How will they handle things like sampling and/or remixes? Are those considered original works? (Generally, no)
Not saying artist hub isn't a cool feature, I'm just not sure how cool it is. More information required. Then again, there are not many classical musicians interested in using modern distribution technologies.
After trying a 2nd time through the non-wizard interface, it turns out all 72 of my songs on this machine are iTunes DRM'd. Humph.
That was the cost of not pirating music.
Most of the songs in my library are non-drm (mp3) and it still took about 18 hours to do steps 1 & 2 (indexing & ?) across 22k songs. Music is stored on a (slow) network attached drobo.
The 5100 songs (25%? Crazy!) that aren't already up there are taking another 24 hours but I assume this is bandwidth dependent.
Crucially, this is all happening in the background, hasn't required my intervention at all, doesn't disrupt using itunes, and once it started uploading everything that it didn't have to upload was immediately available on other devices.
A pretty solid experience, IMO.
Anyone know what happens when the library hits 25k songs???
25k songs applies only to non-iTunes purchased songs. Songs purchased on iTunes don't apply to that limit.
My wife stopped buying DRMed music as soon as it was possible and upgraded every DRMed track iTunes could find and we still discovered that about 5-10% of her tracks were DRMed when we did the great Amazon Cloud Drive upload.
Don't delete that copy.
(Googling for it, it's a multi-disc album that appears to have caused some parsing issues. Amazon's copy: http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Complete-Charlie-Parker-Verve/dp/... )
I can't think of a single example of a company that actually became more popular and relevant when the same thing happened.
(Yeah, okay, Adobe isn't exactly a small company. But they're a lot smaller than Microsoft, but Dreamworks has consolidated its position, and Microsoft killed off Frontpage...)
Hopefully they'll create a non-Flash version at some point in the future, at which point I look forward to trying this.
As a result, 100% of my Google Music use is now on my iOS device through the 3rd party gMusic app. It's so obnoxious to offer only the Flash version considering they already coded and offer an HTML5 player, just not to desktops.
HTML5 has gained ground against Flash for a reason, and I certainly didn't choose it for popularity. I use and prefer open software and open standards, and Flash doesn't provide either one.
If the Flash player ever becomes open, I'll probably install it for convenience, but I'd still use Flashblock and prefer sites based on HTML5 over sites using Flash.
That said, someone told me they got google music playing in a UIWebView on iOS, so there must be some fallback mechanism.
edit: check out section on encryption. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/networ...
What payment options are available?