Category Archives: Music
I’ve Been Asking for Google Music for Years
The notion of re-purchasing music has always deeply offended me. I’ve been a part time DJ for around 8 years and a music lover my entire life. My CD collection is fairly large, and I’m proud of it. I continue to buy CDs because, regardless of what any one company says, I can do what I want with my music. No DRM, now or ever, on my beloved compact discs. MP3.com tried the music locker service many years ago – before the world was ready. As cheap as storage is these days, though, I think we’ll finally get the service I’ve been dreaming of, and it will be called Google Music. There have been rumblings of a Google Music service for over a year and it looks like we’ll finally get the full scoop tomorrow.
In a perfect world, I’d just have to prove that I owned a CD and then get access to it in the cloud. This would surely piss off the labels, as it did years ago when MP3.com did it. What seems more likely to work this time is that which Amazon is doing with their cloud player service – you generate your own music files and then upload them to space on Google’s servers. I live in the Google world – gmail, Google Calendar, etc. – so this should work well for me.
The project of ripping and uploading will be a nightmare for me – but I expect that Google will release some APIs that will allow someone to make a utility that automatically rips and uploads CDs. Then I’ll just do 2 or 3 a night and be finished in a few years. Ugh!
But since Android seems to be headed everywhere – including, I would bet, a reboot of Google TV (pun sort of intended) – it makes sense to get behind Google. The Amazon service intrigues me, but I drank the Google-aid many years ago, and it’s a lot easier to live within their fiefdom.
More on this tomorrow, we’re told, as Google gives out the details at Google I/O.
