A Sneak Peek into Google Music Beta
Yesterday, an invite to try the brand new Google Music Beta arrived in my inbox. “OMFGZZUWWKAW@*&#!!!!” — or so I thought. In this post, I’ll give those of you who haven’t received an invite yet a short glimpse into the service with some of my thoughts on the experience it provides.
Straight from the horse’s mouth, Music Beta is “a new service from Google that lets you store your personal collection online and access it instantly without the hassle of wires or syncing.” It is very similar in function to Amazon’s Cloud Drive that launched a few months back, except Music Beta is a service specifically for storing your music collection in the cloud.
Getting Started
The signup process for Music Beta was extremely easy, only requiring a few clicks to associate it with my existing Google account. After linking my Google account, I was asked to download their Music Manager software so I can begin uploading my music collection.
After downloading, I quickly realized that the Music Manager is hardly a manager of anything — it’s just a simple software app that let’s you pick the place on your computer where you would like to start uploading your music from. A bit lame and misleading, right? :(
Browser Interface & User Experience
So I played along, uploading ~50 songs I had sitting around in a random folder on my desktop. The upload process was paaaainnfullly slow. It took nearly half an hour to upload 50 MP3′s encoded at 320kbps. Once the songs finally uploaded, I headed over to the Music Beta dashboard in my web browser (I use Google Chrome) to try out the interface.
My Library
At first glance, the “My Library” dashboard looked extremely clean and simple, which are two things I always hope to find with any new user experience on the web. Navigating between albums and songs is easy and quick, and the search bar has an auto-complete feature similar to the pre-instant, standard Google search.
Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down Feature
Also included in the beta release is a simple thumbs up and thumbs down feature that lets me decide whether I like or dislike a song in my collection. All of the songs that I give a “thumbs up” to are automatically inserted into a playlist that I can access quickly in the menu on the lefthand side of my dashboard. Cool, I guess?
Auto Playlists, Instant Mixes, & Custom Playlists
Beyond simply playing and organizing music, these three features are also available in Music Beta. There are three Auto Playlists (Thumbs Up, Recently Added, and Free Songs) which I didn’t use at all while trying out the service. There is also the ability to create Instant Mixes of 25 songs by selecting one song and clicking the “instant” + button. I’m not sure if they use any special algorithms to come up with the mix (based on characteristics of the song you selected or something like that), or if it’s completely random. Finally, they also provide the ability to create Custom Playlists, just like iTunes and many other music players do.
Android App
In addition to the browser experience, Google Music Beta is also offerring a free mobile music application for people with phones and tablets running Android 2.2 or higher. I have the HTC Thunderbolt, which falls under this category, so I downloaded the app to give it a whirl.
The app operates nicely, and it’s very smooth to navigate in and out of my music collection. It also lets you sync songs to your device for offline streaming, which is nice. I really couldn’t find any issues with it, to be honest. It’s a simple, straightforward music player for your phone. Win.
Conclusions
Overall, I am impressed with the user experience that Music Beta has to offer, but I haven’t been converted. There is no reinventing of the wheel going on with this service, which I was kind of bummed about. Also, they lack a desktop app, which I sometimes prefer to use instead of keeping yet another tab open in my browser.
Right now, I’m a heavy user of Rdio, another music streaming cloud service. With Rdio, though, you cannot upload your existing music collection — instead, you can upload your iTunes library, but you are limited to what they have available via their ever-expanding licensing deals with labels. So whatever songs they have on their servers that link up with yours will be added to your Rdio collection.
The thing that keeps me an avid Rdio user though is the social aspect they offer with the service. I love that I can follow my friends’ musical tastes, leave reviews, share songs and playlists on my social networks, and interact with other people on Rdio. It is the closest thing I have found online to the good old-fashioned, offline word-of-mouth music discovery.
As of right now, Google Music Beta is just Dropbox for music. If Google somehow integrated a social aspect like their Buzz service with Music Beta in a similar fashion to Rdio, I would probably jump ship and start using Buzz and Music Beta in a heartbeat.
