Google Music Beta Review Roundup: Critics See A Long Road Ahead

Music Beta, Google's cloud-based streaming music service, launched Tuesday at the Google I/O conference, and some lucky reviewers have received early invites to test it out.

First impressions suggest that Google was wise to apply the "beta" moniker before launching the service, which faces an uphill battle against Apple's iTunes and the recently launched Amazon Cloud Drive. But Google's "music locker" does offer a glimpse of what a cloud-based media future could look like, instantly syncing tens of thousands of songs across multiple devices.

We've collected some first impressions about Google Music Beta's wins and losses from PCMag, Engadget, This Is My Next, CNET and MobileBeat. Check out what the critics have to say, then see what the new service means for you.

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Darren Murph, Engadget

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Engadget's Darren Murph pointed out that broadband speeds could be a major hindrance for Music Beta. "Let's say each of your tunes is 3MB -- that's most likely a conservative figure, but we'll use it for the sake of this example. 20,000 of those lands you at around 60GB. For the average broadband user, it'll take days [to upload them all]-- if not a full week or so," Murph wrote. The service, he concluded, "feels like something that was thrown together in the past few months, with the final touches tossed in just weeks ago after heated discussions with labels fell through."

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Engadget's Darren Murph pointed out that broadband speeds could be a major hindrance for Music Beta. "Let's say each of your tunes is 3MB -- that's most likely a conservative figure, but we'll use it for the sake of this example. 20,000 of those lands you at around 60GB. For the average broadband user, it'll take days [to upload them all]-- if not a full week or so," Murph wrote.

The service, he concluded, "feels like something that was thrown together in the past few months, with the final touches tossed in just weeks ago after heated discussions with labels fell through."

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Comments

[Brian Hudson]

03:33 PM on 05/12/2011

So, Amazon was first to market. Google released something second and, predictably, released something with bugs. Apple will take its own time, release when its service is ready, and probably trump both the others in terms of user experience.

[thehighbrowpoliticker]

01:44 PM on 05/12/2011

I downloaded the player for my Droid X and its way better than any music app that I've tried on my phone. I'm just waiting for my Music Beta invitation request to be approved so I can really dive into this. I think cloud music looks promising. By the way, according Google you will be listen to your music offline as well. All you have to do is tag the songs that you want to be available. That should help to get around the data usage issue.

[Cryostatic]

11:36 AM on 05/12/2011

With unlimited data plans on the way out, who would ever choose to store something as commonly used as music in the cloud? The amount of bandwidth that you'd go through playing cloud-based music on a regular basis would eat through your data plan like nothing.

[David Landry]

10:25 AM on 05/12/2011

I'll probably never use it, but I like that they seem (as far as I can tell at this point, and may stand corrected when more details are available) to be throwing down a gauntlet at "Big Music" .. saying skrew you guys, we're going to let people play their music on whatever device they want, whenever they want to, and if you think you can sue us into submission like you did the smaller guys that tried to enable music freedom, then let's rumble.

[Aquest]

10:21 AM on 05/12/2011

Google rushed this out to try to slow down Amazon.