Google Music Beta Makes Your Music Available Anywhere.....

US As Long As You're In The US 11/05/11

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Google today announced Music Beta - a new service that's designed to make your music available anywhere you go.

Music Beta is a cloud-based system - meaning it lets you store you music on a server, someplace on the Internet.

In a nutshell, Google Music Beta lets you:

upload music from any of your devices to an Internet-based storage locker;
play your music from your home PC and Android phones or tablets;
cache recently played music on your mobile devices, so you can listen when offline; and
wirelessly sync data beween devices, so that your music, playlists, etc are available wherever you are.

The Music Beta demo looks promising. Moving your music collection to an Internet-based storage locker, with seemless offline cacheing, should combine the guaranteed availability of a device-stored music collection with the device-independence and infinite capacity of an online solution.

Unfortunately, the promise of Google's solution is handicapped by legal and business constraints, including availability that's currently limited to just the US.

Just as significant is the 'bandwidth barrier' - the hurdle of uploading your music to Google's service. For many users, it will take multiple days for the service to do the initial sync of your music to Internet storage.

The combination of these issues will limit the appeal of Google Music Beta to first-adopters in the US. But as popular as Android devices are, Google is positioning itself to have an important role in how recorded music gets played.

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