Google Music launched in US but it's hardly a revolution

AFTER a year of tweaking, Google finally launched it’s music service in the US yesterday. The search engine's download platform aims to do for Android device owners what iTunes has done for users of Apple ipods and iphones and become a place where users can purchase new music and store their existing collection.

It looks a bit like iTunes, it works a lot like iTunes and the prices of the downloads are, well, a lot like iTunes actually - between 69 cents and $1.29 (99p) each. This isn't such a bad thing - iTunes is great and works really well.

So much for the revolution.
 
As with their competitor to Facebook - Google + - the first impressions of Google Music is that the company has launched an inferior version of something that already exists elsewhere. Not a better one or something that changes the rules.

It's all a bit of a shame really because if anyone stood a chance of breaking iTunes' monopoly and of changing people’s habits away from downloading music for free to actually willingly buying it, then it was Google.

Something that no music company or download service will ever admit to is that part of the seduction of illegally downloading music isn't just that it's free, it's that it's simple. And what makes it free, simple and easy? Well, that would be the Google search engine which helps us locate it all. Thanks, Google.

In the world of legitimate downloading, catalogue is everything. Consumers are less likely to stray beyond the walls of a particular store if it contains everything we want. But here, too, Google is falling short, with 13 million songs compared to Apple's 20 million - in part due to the fact that Warners have yet to sign up, meaning no Madonna, REM or dozens of other iconic artists.

Not that Google isn't without it's innovations - it recommends music to you in a variety of serendipitous ways, pulling information from your taste and suggestions from your friends as well as a staff of music critics contributing reviews and tips. It's nicer than iTunes' often wayward algorithm-based model. Who wants to discover a new band because a computer program told them?

Storing your music on Google, as with iTunes, is free and in another neat touch you can stream tracks in full - but only once, which seems rather parsimonious when you compare it to Spotify - the music service that allows unlimited streaming of over 15 million tracks.

Spotify has been a big hit in Britain and recently launched in America, where one of its investors is Sean Parker, the man who helped bring us Napster and the collapse of the music industry and the western hemisphere as we knew it.  

Last year Spotify was hailed as the business model for the future survival of paid music. It was free, but advertising and subscriptions for the ad-free, expanded versions meant that it also paid royalties to artists. But here, too, there has been disharmony recently with acts such as Coldplay refusing to allow their new album to be hosted on the service and some independent labels withdrawing their entire catalogue.

The reason why is that despite Spotify providing a revenue stream to record labels and a legitimate way for consumers to hear free new music the royalty rates are so low as to be almost pointless. An artist’s revenue from Spotify is a minuscule 0.0012p per track according to some data (the company is not exactly open when it comes to revealing this information) compared to around 30p an act would typically expect to make from a CD single.

Licensing issues mean there has been no announcement yet about when Google Music will be available in the UK. Hopefully when it does launch in Europe it will be more than what it is right now - just another music download store.

What's needed is something that operates somewhere between free and paid downloading - for the generation who have grown up not having to pay for their music, 99p seems rather a lot regardless of your desire to fill your phone with tunes.

A system where payment is linked to how many times you play or share a track might be fairer and something genuinely new - or an online store that allows groups of friends to pool their collections together as one.

Digital music needs to replicate the way people used to listen to music before the internet and actually still do beyond the boring prism of their software - lending albums to friends, making mix tapes to impress new girlfriends, obsessing over the hidden meanings of an album sleeve.

Something tells me that the real reason these technology companies haven't helped create a viable future for music is because they are not run by music fans or people who understand music, they are run by programmers who think of songs as files and bands as providers of content. ·