Google media
Google kicks-off its annual developer conference - Google I/O - today, with lots of juicy product announcements hoped for. But one of the biggies seems to have leaked out in advance, with many publications reporting as fact that Google will announce its own cloud music offering, thanks to briefings with Google execs in advance of the announcement.
Billboard spoke to Google director of content partnerships Zahavah Levine, who said the service will be called Google Music Beta, and will allow people to upload their music to the cloud in order to be able to access it from multiple devices. Levine revealed that Google had hoped to offer more than that, but its negotiations with the major music publishers had stalled.
"We've been in negotiations with the industry for a different set of features, with mixed results," she told Billboard. "[But] a couple of major labels were less focused on innovation and more on demanding unreasonable and unsustainable business terms." Billboard reckons those were Sony and Universal.
There was clearly a general pre-briefing strategy from Google on this one, apparently to deflect any potential criticism of the limitations of the new service onto the labels. "Unfortunately, a couple of the major labels were less focused on the innovative vision that we put forward, and more interested in in an unreasonable and unsustainable set of business terms," Jamie Rosenberg, who oversees digital content and strategy for Android, told All Things D.
The service is expected to be very similar to the Amazon Cloud Drive launched at the end of March. It will be free and we expect Google to continue to speak to music publishers with the aim of being able to sell, or in some other way help them commercialise their music.
Google has officially announced another product in advance of the conference: movie rentals on YouTube. This is actually more of a product enhancement, with YouTube Movies having got off to a tentative start at the beginning of this year. Now you can rent movies like GoodFellas, as well as accessing trailers, reviews etc. But this service is restricted to the US for now. Notably Google does seem to have done deals with the likes of Sony and Universal on this one.
Lest we forget, the big announcement at last year's Google I/O was Google TV, which seems to have gone completely off the boil a year later. So the pressure is on Google to deliver some tangible successes this year.
