Google is one of the several companies to launch their own music services. Iomega being one of them has an offer of 1 terabyte storage capacity built in to the HDD. This MX HD Media Player of 1TB, complements the Home Theater set-up as well as the HDTV, and makes the HTPC less pertinent in the living room. Similarly there is the ASUS O!Play Mini which is an HD media player for the home first launched in India similar to Iomega. ASUS O!Play seeks to distinguish itself as a 4-in-1 card reader. Google is all set to launch its new music service as a rivaling service to Apple iTunes.
The battle is now on in the mobile arena, where the Android platform meets its adversary in the iOS area of applications. Looking at Google mobile services as of today, we can see that as per the Android arena, there is the Google video and now there will be Google Music. As Motorola puts it, Google’s upcoming Honeycomb platform which launches with the Xoom tablet, is set to playback the Google music services for starters. Google announced the launch of its music store due probably by the fourth quarter of 2011 as the platform is in line with iTunes from Apple. It will be difficult for Google to confine the music services to the Android market only. Google will plan to have a digital locker, to stream music from, and allow music downloads to its search results.
Andy Rubin of Google Music is the force behind getting Google Music up and running. Google has an uphill task with examples of other stores finding it a daunting task to set up music services. Amazon could only reach 12% of the digital music market for its music services. Google music services would become very desirable if it is teamed with the Android handsets through a downloadable App. According to Andy Rubin who is in serious talks about music labels and is planning to launch a music service in time for the holiday season for Christmas this year.
Initially Google is set to launch the music services with downloads and later include subscription services to it. Timing the Google Music launch to the release of Android’s Gingerbread 3.0 operating system which is due in the fourth quarter of the year 2011 is probably what has been planned. According to a report, Google’s music store is set to be called ‘Google Audio’.
