Google plans to to introduce an online music service tomorrow, allowing users to upload their music collections to the web and stream songs to computers or Android mobile devices. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNET have all received information about the new service in advance of tomorrow’s launch.
It appears the service will be called Music Beta by Google, and it will look a lot like the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player which launched last month. Like Amazon, Google will allow users to upload large music collections to the web and listen from anywhere. But while Amazon also lets customers purchase MP3 tracks to store in their online music lockers, Google doesn’t have the deals with music labels in place to launch a digital music store.
On the other hand, Amazon only provides users with 5GB of free storage which gets upgraded to 20GB when users buy an album for any price from Amazon MP3. Google plans to offer users enough space to store up to 20,000 songs — which is about 50GB.
Google will also allow users to create playlists. Leaked pre-release versions of Google’s Android music player have been making the rounds for months, with features that have suggested online music storage and streaming was on the way. But up until now that feature hasn’t been usable.
The Music Beta service is expected to roll out over the next few weeks.
