..this is interesting.

The only way I see it happening is if Google tells the labels they'll implement some kind of pirated content fingerprinting/detection for tracks the user uploads (they already have it for Youtube, IIRC.) If this does take off, I think it's a good approach, and I hope it gains traction, if only to increase competition and hopefully drive down prices.

I've been curious to see what they do with a music service, but this doesn't sound like something compelling enough for even an admitted Google fanboy like me to jump over to.

At this point, I can't see myself going back to a pay-per-track music service. I'm really loving the subscription model, and have saved quite a bit of money with it.

With Google, I'd have to pay $25/year on top of paying for the tracks themselves? I already pay for extra storage at Google for GMail and Picasa Web Albums, so why should I have to pay for this too?

I think there's a lot we still don't know, so we'll have to see. But they have a long road ahead of them. I do agree that competition is good, but I would have thought Amazon had it in them to compete with iTunes, and prices have only gone up on iTunes since they started with a service that was better in almost every way when it started.

The record labels still control price quite a bit, so more stores simply means more knobs to fiddle with at companies supplying the music, and not actual price competition visible to the end user. For an example of this, look at what happened when Apple wanted to go DRM free to be on equal footing with Amazon. The record labels said "sure, but only if we get to have variable pricing including amounts above $0.99".

Wasn't that a while after the DRM went away? I never got the impression that it was expressly because of that.

Apple added "iTunes Plus" in May 2007, the $1.29 DRM free, 256 kbit format as an alternative to the $0.99, 128 kbit DRM format. Only EMI signed on (along with a few independents later). October of 07, the price dropped to the same $0.99 for Plus songs. January 09 was when everything switched to iTunes Plus, after Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group agreed. That was also when the labels had agreed to let their music be downloaded over 3G to iPhones. Up till then, it was WiFi only. So not only do the labels control a lot of the pricing, they also control the little details of what network their music can be downloaded over.

Spotify looks like a neat music service. Too bad it's not available in the US because of "licensing issues". Any European users want to jump in and say if this service is really "all that"? It might be time to find a proxy server.

I don't know what's taking it so long to get over here, but in the meantime there are other services that have popped up and filled the void. First Grooveshark and now MOG, which has a pretty impressive selection.

Spotify works well. I've got it integrated to Squeezeboxcenter/server/whateveritscalledthesedays as well. I can also play it from my phone.

Grooveshark has some potential legal issues.