Google Music now available to everyone in the US

http://music.google.com?

by mrsebastian • 15 years ago

88 67 15 years ago

music.google.com

melvinram• 15 years ago

Not everyone. I had to request an invitation and don't have one yet.

iam• 15 years ago

I requested an invite a few weeks ago and got in the next day

starwed• 15 years ago

Do you need an invitation? AFAIK I'd never requested one, but seemed to be able to use the site. (While logged in to my regular google account.)

semenko• 15 years ago

Boy, the Android Music Market sure has some great pricing options! https://market.android.com/details?id=album-Btvootmxvdamb4jr...

(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/... )

jasonabelli• 15 years ago

HAHAHA, I'm sure they will work out the kinks. In the mean time, who wants to purchase a $100 album?

estel• 15 years ago

For those of us not in the US, what are they?

angryasian2• 15 years ago

the artists hub, and sharing.. are really the killer features of this release. Also the fact they are allowing artists direct control, like distributing concerts and any other tracks they'd like to share is a pretty awesome feature.

chrisguitarguy• 15 years ago

Artist hub is sort of awesome. As classical musician, I'd be limited to uploading only public domain music. Anything modern would require licensing agreements, how would Google handle that?

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.

darrellsilver3• 15 years ago

Tried to upload music and received this hilarious message: http://yfrog.com/ocygcp

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.

blinkingled• 15 years ago

I am going through a painful process of spending $25 on iTunes Match, waiting for it to complete matching, then finding the purchased DRM iTunes tracks, deleting them and re-downloading them so that I have DRM-free 256Kbps tracks.

That was the cost of not pirating music.

darrellsilver3• 15 years ago

Signed up for iTunes Match earlier this week...

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???

baby2• 15 years ago

Had a similar problem. Hopefully I haven't bought that many songs through iTunes. Redownloading them without DRM via zippyshare/mediafire/hulkshare...

nknight• 15 years ago

I take it you're not willing to pay the $0.30/track to upgrade to the 256kbps un-DRM'd music that's been available for years?

fpgeek2• 15 years ago

Last time I checked, it looked like there were plenty of non-DRMed tracks that aren't (or at least weren't) eligible for upgrade.

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.

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

Following the link took me to a page demanding that I agree to additional terms of service first, but dragging that window out of the way revealed the indication that Google Music won't work without Flash, so I didn't bother going any further. More sites should provide that kind of information before signup; thanks for that.

Hopefully they'll create a non-Flash version at some point in the future, at which point I look forward to trying this.

baby2• 15 years ago

We've used flash for everything for ages. Hell, if you look at the competition Deezer is in flash. I know the tendency these days is for HTML5 and against Flash but really? Aren't you trying to be a hipster here?

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

We used asbestos for ages too, because it got the job done, and we didn't bother looking for alternatives to that until we had to.

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.

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

Hardly. I use ClickToPlugin to improve general website performance which breaks Google Music, and I have to completely disable it to use the Google Music web player.

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.

tonfa• 15 years ago

Since it works on iOS, there should be a way to get served the html5 version.

johnbatch2• 15 years ago

Works fine if you change your user agent to iPad.

angryasian2• 15 years ago

i think the issue is with content protection and I believe with ios they have a client side drm protection. What legal music services aren't using flash for the only reason of digital content protection ?

edit: check out section on encryption. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/networ...

brown• 15 years ago

I now listen to the majority of my music on Youtube. Most of the songs I want to listen to are there. For free. And legally.

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.

code_duck• 15 years ago

Grooveshark has some significant improvements related to Youtube - songs each have their own pages with a Video section, and you can click to play Youtube videos in a modal window. It's in their 'preview' site at the moment.

Toddward2• 15 years ago

I'm curious how you would have them integrate. Google announced during the event that they were working with YouTube to allow artists to sell tracks directly against their YouTube channels.

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.

ethank2• 15 years ago

YouTube and Google Music are separate product teams. Google Music is run through Android.

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.

minalecs• 15 years ago

i think the difference is that for example vevo has ads supporting the music you listen/watch through the youtube channel. As of now there's not the ad alternative through google music.

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.

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

Music labels and other such organizations extort huge piles of money from YouTube for the "privilege" of hosting those songs. The pile of ads you see along with those videos go to paying that extortion.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

I don't know how people listen to music on Youtube. The audio quality on those videos at less than 720p is unacceptable. Even people that walk around listening to 128kbps mp3s can tell when I ask them to swtich from 360/480 to the 720p stream.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

I think the non-HD videos actually have monaural sound. When you switch to 720p, you get your stereo back.

radicaldreamer• 15 years ago

Instant gratification beats quality for most people.

itsnotvalid• 15 years ago

There is noticeable difference between 360p and 480p stream on Youtube already. They somehow managed to degrade that much for little bitrate difference.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

You do have a Youtube music player in google+ now, though. But yeah, this is definitely a record labels' decision ultimately. I'm surprised they even went along with the artist hub.

VMG• 15 years ago

I case you didn't already know: http://www.grooveshark.com

Toddward2• 15 years ago

I'm extremely interested to see how today's Music announcements will tie into Google's rumored GDrive plans.

abraham• 15 years ago

I don't see there being that much overlap other then maybe counting towards storage and maybe uploading using the Drive client.

krosaen• 15 years ago

I like the artist hub, and streaming / syncing offline of my library. But I really don't like the absence of a subscription option to listen to whatever I want. I can't imagine paying nearly the price of one month premium rdio or spotify service for a single album anymore. If they are going to charge per album, they really need aggressively low pricing like lala.com did for "unlimited web plays" (~$1 per album).

sologoub• 15 years ago

Love how Chrome popped a warning that not all content on the page is secure, asking whether to load it or not. Don't load option was recommended... LOL!

eddieplan9• 15 years ago

First, google offers broke browser back button when it was launched [1]. And now this. Google does not know how to build a good web app; and does not know how to get search work in Andriod Market. What universe are we living in?

[1] http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2471767

johnbatch2• 15 years ago

Since it's run by the Android team, I guess there is never going to be an iPhone app.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

Just like there's no iPhone app for Gmail, Voice, Reader, Maps, etc.?

fpgeek2• 15 years ago

But, but there isn't an iPhone version of the Android Market, so there!

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

Not relevant as those products aren't run by the Android team.

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

There are 3rd party apps, though. Try gMusic for iOS, it's pretty good.

mindslight• 15 years ago

Awesome - yet another way to support those backing SOPA.

NegativeK• 15 years ago

I was particularly amused to see Google and the music execs on stage for a product announcement on the same day that a Google legal team was Congress's whipping boy for the SOPA hearing.

Raphael• 15 years ago

Too bad I don't have $25 to register as an artist.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Every time I see a cool announcement like this one, I'm painfully reminded that Germany is 10 years behind in every possible way when it comes to digital entertainment. I am nor jealous, just really sad.

phzbOx• 15 years ago

You know the question the VCs always ask: "What if google decided to attack your market, what would you do?" I guess it's a sad day for a couple of promising startups.

superkarn• 15 years ago

Or a day your startup got another validation.

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

Does anyone have a good example of this actually happening? I can think of countless small companies that were shuttered soon after a much larger company horned in on their business.

I can't think of a single example of a company that actually became more popular and relevant when the same thing happened.

earbitscom• 15 years ago

Easy response, to quote a friend, is: There's Google Ventures. What do you do?

Qz• 15 years ago

It still refuses to show my cloud music (as seen through the web app) on my phone. I've been using Amazon's Cloud Player instead with no problems.

DonnyV3• 15 years ago

So when is Google Music going to be added to the Data liberation page? https://plus.google.com/settings/exportdata I would really hate to have all my songs be held hostage in Google Music.

billnapier• 15 years ago

You can download all the tracks you purchased from http://music.google.com/.

DonnyV3• 15 years ago

Yes but what about all of my tracks I uploaded?

majika• 15 years ago

Is it still possible to create an account with a US VPN and use it from elsewhere in the world forever more?

What payment options are available?

Grufle• 15 years ago

Yea, I used Hotspot Shield and could sign up just fine. Then I used Market Enabler on my rooted Android and got the Music APK through the market. Works like a charm.

Google Music now available to everyone in the US

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