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What Kind Of Music Store Is Google Cooking Up?

9:37 p.m. · October 13, 2011 · by John Capone

Word on the street (and by "the street" we mean the people at Google who leak news to the press) is that Google is readying a music store of its own to compete with iTunes. Obviously Google is acting fast to strike while Apple is busy creating tributes to Steve Jobs in Keynote. 

The New York Times Media Decoder blog calls the potential initiative by Google an "MP3 store that would compete with Apple and Amazon." This comes, of course, on the heels of Google's launch of its cloud music service Google Music Beta. Media Decoder reports that Google is in negations with the major labels to make the service possible, though with nobody from Google or the labels willing to comment officially, what the service will consist of is open to conjecture. 

One imagines that Google may not be exactly planning an MP3 download service like those offered by iTunes and Amazon and might be working on something that would allow low-cost cloud access to music, akin to the system LaLa (acquired and shuttered by Apple) offered, in which purchasing a song for a few cents allowed unlimited online listening but not a download. 

This is something that would tie in well with Google's (at present very, very buggy and awkward) Music Beta service and not necessitate a whole hog launch of a new store. Given the time constraints -- Google is expected to officially launch its endeavor before Apple's latest cloud offering, iTunes Match goes live at the end of October -- this seems the most likely course of action.