2012年元旦快乐!# Biology - 生物学
B*f
1 楼
Google blows Apple’s iTunes Match out of the digital music water … in
Europe first
Free is the ultimate weapon — for the world’s biggest advertising company.
More than a year after Apple introduced iTunes Match, technology that lets
you sync all your music to the cloud and enjoy it on any device (errr, any
Apple device), and three months after Amazon announced similar capabilities
with its Cloud Match service, Google is following suit:
We’re also launching our new matching feature to streamline the process
of uploading your personal music to Google Play. We’ll scan your music
collection, and any song we match against the Google Play catalog will be
automatically added to your online library without needing to upload it,
saving you time. This will be available in Europe at launch on November 13
and is coming to the U.S. soon after. This will all be for free — free
storage of your music, free matching, free syncing across your devices, and
free listening.
According to CNet, Google was going to announce the new service at its
October 29 event. Then, of course, Hurricane Sandy happened. So Google
announced the news on its blog instead. This was expected … but the big
news is coded into the last sentence of the announcement.
Can you say “free?”
The announcement’s last sentence uses the word “free” no less than five
times: free storage, free matching, free syncing, and free listening.
Without mentioning any competitors, Google is emphasizing as hard as it can
the fact that iTunes Match costs $25/year and Amazon’s Cloud Match, while
free for up to 250 songs, also costs $25 for up to 250,000 songs.
That may force Apple — and Amazon — to make some changes. Both Apple and
Amazon make money when people buy stuff from them — digital or physical
stuff. Google, on the other hand, makes money when people give their
attention to its services — it sells that attention to advertisers.
Google’s version of the music matching services will allow users to add up
to 20,000 songs from their existing music collections to their Google Play
account. One other key difference from Apple’s matching solution is that
Google will enable music streaming of those songs to Android devices or web
browsers (Apple’s version is not exactly streaming; it’s download and play
).
That’s huge, since you’ll be able to access your music whenever and
wherever you want, on just about any device, as long as you have an Internet
connection.
Some music execs have called matching services “legitimizing” piracy, but
the main goal is to enable consumers to finally leave behind those mounds of
plastic-encased music for the digital world. In order to offer this service
, Google needed the approval of the major music labels. The Europe-first
strategy is likely a function of the status of contract negotiations with
various labels.
The question now is: How will Apple and Amazon respond?
Europe first
Free is the ultimate weapon — for the world’s biggest advertising company.
More than a year after Apple introduced iTunes Match, technology that lets
you sync all your music to the cloud and enjoy it on any device (errr, any
Apple device), and three months after Amazon announced similar capabilities
with its Cloud Match service, Google is following suit:
We’re also launching our new matching feature to streamline the process
of uploading your personal music to Google Play. We’ll scan your music
collection, and any song we match against the Google Play catalog will be
automatically added to your online library without needing to upload it,
saving you time. This will be available in Europe at launch on November 13
and is coming to the U.S. soon after. This will all be for free — free
storage of your music, free matching, free syncing across your devices, and
free listening.
According to CNet, Google was going to announce the new service at its
October 29 event. Then, of course, Hurricane Sandy happened. So Google
announced the news on its blog instead. This was expected … but the big
news is coded into the last sentence of the announcement.
Can you say “free?”
The announcement’s last sentence uses the word “free” no less than five
times: free storage, free matching, free syncing, and free listening.
Without mentioning any competitors, Google is emphasizing as hard as it can
the fact that iTunes Match costs $25/year and Amazon’s Cloud Match, while
free for up to 250 songs, also costs $25 for up to 250,000 songs.
That may force Apple — and Amazon — to make some changes. Both Apple and
Amazon make money when people buy stuff from them — digital or physical
stuff. Google, on the other hand, makes money when people give their
attention to its services — it sells that attention to advertisers.
Google’s version of the music matching services will allow users to add up
to 20,000 songs from their existing music collections to their Google Play
account. One other key difference from Apple’s matching solution is that
Google will enable music streaming of those songs to Android devices or web
browsers (Apple’s version is not exactly streaming; it’s download and play
).
That’s huge, since you’ll be able to access your music whenever and
wherever you want, on just about any device, as long as you have an Internet
connection.
Some music execs have called matching services “legitimizing” piracy, but
the main goal is to enable consumers to finally leave behind those mounds of
plastic-encased music for the digital world. In order to offer this service
, Google needed the approval of the major music labels. The Europe-first
strategy is likely a function of the status of contract negotiations with
various labels.
The question now is: How will Apple and Amazon respond?
