In a market long dominated by iTunes and Amazon’s mp3 store, there is now a new player with whom we’re all familiar: Google. While the streaming cloud service has been available in an invite-only beta for several months, the now public service also features an online music store as well.
I was lucky enough to score an invite when Google Music was still beta. Although iTunes offers the iCloud service to all iOS users, the initial storage capacity is only 5 GB. While that may work for many (somewhere between 1,000-1,500 songs) it’s not enough for others and additional storage will have to be purchased. Google Music, on the other hand, is offering users up to 20,000 songs each for free. While size and length of each song will depend and cause this figure to vary slightly, this comes out to roughly 100 GB. Free. That alone makes Google Music worth a second or third glance.
The better part of Google Music, in my opinion, is not so much the digital store as this has been available for quite some time from other vendors. The ability to stream 20,000 songs for free to any PC with internet or any smartphone is nothing short of amazing. There is, as of today, no official iOS app available but by logging in through the web, iPhone users can still take advantage of Google Music while on the go. Over the past few months, I’ve been pulling music off my phone’s storage and streaming it instead. Yes, there’s a slight delay at first (similar to streaming a YouTube video) but the convenience makes it entirely worth it. If music is a significant part of how you use your phone, Google Music is definitely worth a try!
