Google moves to Smash Itunes
Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 6:50 am
Hey Peeps
Saw this and thought it might be of interest to some...
Google has launched its own music service at last. Initially an American release it will enable people to share songs through Google+ and it will be free - instantly offering two major advantages over Apple's iTunes, which is the obvious competitor and market leader.
The scheme has been in beta for a while, and will let people store up to 20,000 songs. Apple's service starts charging after 5 gigabytes but will require a small annual subscription to identify and match songs not bought from iTunes, and then of course there's the cost of the songs themselves.
Google will also let artists create their own pages as they used to do with MySpace. Apple does this to an extent but its social content, through its Ping network and the ability to follow artists, has yet to catch a wide market's imagination.
Realism
The big question is: will this actually eat into iTunes' market share? My guess is that it won't but it might give Facebook some pause for thought in its tie-up with Spotify. Or it might not even do that.
The thing about Apple is that it's so far ahead in the music market it's not worth chasing at the moment. In future, yes, but for the moment it's a back burner thing. Facebook and Spotify as a new partnership may be a better target to knock off the top.
Even then, however, there is an issue: Facebook was already huge in social media. In spite of sign-ups since its launch, Google+ has only around a tenth of the membership - and that's if you assume everyone is active on the network, which they won't be. Spotify was already big in music, at least in Europe, which Google isn't.
So Google effectively has to conquer two markets in which it is effectively a new player.
I'm not saying it can't be done, and I'm not even saying Google isn't the company to do it. But it's going to be tricky to achieve.
Chris
Saw this and thought it might be of interest to some...
Google has launched its own music service at last. Initially an American release it will enable people to share songs through Google+ and it will be free - instantly offering two major advantages over Apple's iTunes, which is the obvious competitor and market leader.
The scheme has been in beta for a while, and will let people store up to 20,000 songs. Apple's service starts charging after 5 gigabytes but will require a small annual subscription to identify and match songs not bought from iTunes, and then of course there's the cost of the songs themselves.
Google will also let artists create their own pages as they used to do with MySpace. Apple does this to an extent but its social content, through its Ping network and the ability to follow artists, has yet to catch a wide market's imagination.
Realism
The big question is: will this actually eat into iTunes' market share? My guess is that it won't but it might give Facebook some pause for thought in its tie-up with Spotify. Or it might not even do that.
The thing about Apple is that it's so far ahead in the music market it's not worth chasing at the moment. In future, yes, but for the moment it's a back burner thing. Facebook and Spotify as a new partnership may be a better target to knock off the top.
Even then, however, there is an issue: Facebook was already huge in social media. In spite of sign-ups since its launch, Google+ has only around a tenth of the membership - and that's if you assume everyone is active on the network, which they won't be. Spotify was already big in music, at least in Europe, which Google isn't.
So Google effectively has to conquer two markets in which it is effectively a new player.
I'm not saying it can't be done, and I'm not even saying Google isn't the company to do it. But it's going to be tricky to achieve.
Chris
