Google has just announced on their Google Play page that you can now upload your music library to Google Play, and they will scan them and keep a copy in the cloud for free and let you stream to your devices as needed. This “digital music locker” is currently limited to 20,000 songs and US users. Microsoft and Apple offer similar services, but charge $25 every year. Tech site AllThingsD suggests that the other companies charge money as this effectively “launders” pirated music into officially paid-for music, and Google probably just paid a big flat fee to make this happen for everyone.
Our new music matching feature gets your songs into your online music library on Google Play much faster. We’ll scan your collection and quickly rebuild it in the cloud – all for free. And we’ll stream your music back to you at up to 320 kbps.
I simply interpret this as a free way to back up all my music files online and not have to worry about a hard drive crash. I was able to upload all my songs overnight – sucked straight from iTUnes – and I can now see and stream them to my phone or computer (or download them). Pretty neat.
The Best Credit Card Bonus Offers – November 2024
Big List of Free Stocks from Brokerage Apps
Best Interest Rates on Cash - November 2024
Free Credit Scores x 3 + Free Credit Monitoring
Best No Fee 0% APR Balance Transfer Offers
Little-Known Cellular Data Plans That Can Save Big Money
How To Haggle Your Cable or Direct TV Bill
Big List of Free Consumer Data Reports (Credit, Rent, Work)
hmm, music laundering, that’s a new concept.
You can add Amazon to the list as well (250 songs for free; 200k songs for $25). I wonder how the powerful RIAA was subdued.
Also curious why Napster was labelled as evil and shutdown without mercy, but Google is allowed to do pretty much the same with music player and youtube.
@whytax, how is this ‘”pretty much the same thing”. Napster was peer to peer sharing, allowing folks to share each others songs. What amazon, apple, and google have done is allow you to upload your own music to their servers. The problem in allowing the public to upload to their servers is that alot of folks have pirated songs already within their own private music collections, placing these companies in the awkward position of holding pirated songs for people . The agreement they have with the music industry protects the companies from this problem without forcing them to turn folks in suspected of pirating. Negative publicity from turning in their own customers for suspected pirating would destroy the service and customer loyalty. With the music industry carrying so much clout, they can impose this unfortunate fee as a cost of business that these companies have to pay the music industry to avoid playing bad cop for them.
Tried it. It failed on all my itunes music. Bummer.