There have been various announcements over the past few months that got me excited about both options. They both have some great benefits and the implementations are very functional, if not even downright awesome. To some degree, it isn’t really a “tough choice” at all, as I already know which option I’m going to go with.
Of course, I’m talking about Google Music vs Amazon Cloud Player.
To be fair, as of this writing, I haven’t actually tried the Google Music Beta, though I signed up for an invite as soon as I found out that this thing exists at all. I’ve been using the Amazon Cloud Player, though, and like it quite a bit.
I guess I should describe the pros and cons. The Amazon Cloud Player was launched in late March, providing users with 5 GB of free storage space for their files. MP3s, documents, pictures, videos, etc. Any MP3s stored on this virtual drive, however, can be streamed over the internet through your web browser or smart phone (i.e. Android and iOS), through what they call the Cloud Player. If you buy any digital album from Amazon MP3, then your 5 GB of storage is increased to 20 GB – you can purchase additional space thereafter. The service has worked well, from my perspective, and it’s nice to be able to pull up any of my albums and play them from practically anywhere, especially as I’m not carrying my laptop around with me 24/7 like I used to.
Amazon kinda shocked the world when they released this, however. It was long expected that Apple or Google would go there first, but they were dealing with the legal rights to stream music over the internet. The question, from a legal standpoint, is whether it is legal to purchase music, upload it to a different location, and then stream it like a radio station. Does that violate the license that you agree to when you purchase an MP3? No clear answer was given, so Google and Apple were trying to get things finalized before going ahead with their respective plans.
Amazon basically just said “oh well” and did it anyway. And so far, to my knowledge, no one has sued them.
Therefore, it was expected that Google would make an announcement during their now annual I/O developer’s conference. And as expected, Google announced their long-awaited solution: Google Music. Since Amazon took the lead, they had to come forward with something to show their burgeoning community. And show they did.
The Google Music Beta, rolling out piecemeal by invitation only (much like Gmail did), allows you to upload 20,000 songs to their cloud service, and then you can stream it to your Android devices or the web. In that way, it’s very similar to the Amazon Cloud Player. The catch is that Google Music should be capable of providing better sound quality, even over a relatively slow 3G wireless connection. Right now, however, you cannot actually purchase music through the Google Music interface like you can from the Amazon system. Therefore, for digital music, you still need Amazon MP3 or iTunes.
The kicker for me, however, is offline play.
With Google Music, you can “pin” a song, album, or playlist that will synchronize that music on your various devices. It will automatically synchronize your “recently played” music, as well. So, for example, if I want to “pin” Under The Table And Dreaming (and I will…), Google Music will download the album to my phone, allowing me to play that music even when my phone isn’t on an internet connection. And this is extremely important for people like us that don’t have unlimited data plans, or that tend to drive long distances through areas that don’t have the best cellular coverage. I can rely on streaming, but I don’t have to.
With a single, software-based approach, Google provided me with a good reason to abandon my iPod Nano.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPod. The thing is light, gets good battery life, and is tiny. Or “nano,” if you will. But, I have to physically connect it to my laptop to transfer podcasts and music. This isn’t that huge of a deal breaker for me, to tell you the truth, but I’ve got its cute little 8 GB hard drive maxed out, so I’m constantly selecting which podcasts need to go on the hard drive and when. And sometimes, new editions of my podcasts are released while I’m at work, preventing me from being able to actually add them to my iPod, because my iPod is only linked with my laptop.
Now, using my phone, I can stream all of my music (~15 GB?) over the internet, and save the ones I want on my phone’s mini-SD card. Moreover, as my phone has WiFi on it and a wealth of apps, I can access most if not all of those podcasts without having to download them to whatever device I’m using.
So in the end, I think I’ll be using the Google Music offering. At least, once I get an invite. For the time-being, I’ll settle for the Amazon Cloud Player. It’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does to compete here, as Apple will be announcing their own “iCloud” service sometime in the relatively near future, and if Amazon wants to compete, they’ll have to do some drastic things. iCloud will be built into every iOS device, and Google Music will be built into every Android device. And the legal drama certainly isn’t over, as the record labels are unhappy with Google’s plan, and likely won’t be all that happy with Apple’s, either.