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Business News Digital Top Stories
Google streaming service imminent
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 15 May 2013
Sony and Universal are on board, they’ve lined up, they’ve put on special hats and are already in a party mood, for the long-expected, much-anticipated, sure-to-be-an-anti-climax launch of the Google streaming music service. Which, as I’m sure many of my fellow journalists will be keen to point out, is almost certainly (not) a Spotify-killer. The launch is imminent it seems. Which presumably means at the Google developer conference that kicks off later today.
Google, Apple and Amazon are all rumoured to have streaming music services of one kind or another in development as they move to expand or retain their share of the digital music market. While start up streaming services (and long term players like Rhapsody and Pandora) have started to gain momentum in terms of user-base in recent years, the three big web giants have in the main stuck with their respective download platforms, gluing digital locker services on the side, none of which really lived up to the hype. But all seem to have now decided streaming is where the future lies.
The problem with streaming services, over conventional download stores, is that they generally put a lot more financial risk on the service provider in terms of royalty guarantees. And Google, Apple and Amazon don’t like risk. Though, while they’ve been negotiating hard with the major content owners to secure better deals than those enjoyed by the start ups, insiders say the labels haven’t budged all that much. Presumably the big three hope they can scale up fast enough in terms of subscribers and/or advertising revenue to reduce the risk.
Warner – usually one of the last rights owners on board for these things – was seemingly first to sign up to the Google streaming service. Deals with Sony and Universal are now also reportedly in the bag, which is seemingly enough to launch. It’s not clear what the deal with the indies is just yet. The service, which will be more of the Spotify fully-on-demand variety, will operate as part of the Google Play platform, presumably with a groovy Android app.
Google’s previous plays in the music space, most recently via Google Play, have been somewhat lacklustre despite being much hyped at launch. And while the big fat exception to that is YouTube, the biggest streaming music service on the internet, Google technically bought that one in rather than launch it from scratch. Whether Googify is the original music service that breaks that record remains to be seen.
