Google Music, the search giant’s foray into cloud music, today received a major boost by inking a broad deal with an alliance of French, Italian and Spanish licensing groups, gaining access to an additional 5.5 million tracks across 35 European countries from various artists including Lady Gaga and Rihanna. It also includes the British and American repertoire of Universal Music Publishing and Sony’s Latin works…
Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing rumors about the so-called pan-European Music Store for ages. The iTunes Store is currently available in 63 countries worldwide and remains the most popular music vendor in the world with a 28 million-strong song catalogue versus “millions available for purchase” on Google Music.
Bloomberg has more:
Catherine Kerr-Vignale of France’ SACEM said Google’s rivals, such as Amazon and Apple’s iTunes, have country-by-country licensing agreements.
Apparently royalties for publishers and artists are comparable to Amazon’s and Apple’s.
She added that the royalty for publishers and artists was in line with industry standards involving Google rivals like Amazon and Apple’s iTunes. She declined to specify.
All major music labels, including Warner Music Group, are on Google Music now. Unfortunately, a year following the service’s launch and Google still doesn’t provide a Google Music iOS app – something tells me Apple isn’t keen on having it on the App Store.
Here’s a nice promo clip.
In October, the search monster promised a scan-and-match capability so it can analyze your local library and automatically add items to the cloud without needing to upload individually matched songs. It went live in Europe on November 13 and is due “soon after” in US.
Apple offers the same feature called iTunes Match, but it comes with a $25 a year price tag. As some of you have noticed, iTunes Match experienced a brief outage this morning following a string of issues with iMessage, App Store, FaceTime and other iCloud services.
In a landmark deal, the iPhone maker today has managed to bring the entire catalogue of the Australian rock band AC/DC on iTunes.
The company is also scheduled to launch iTunes 11, a major revision, by end of November and is though to be working on a streaming music service akin to Rdio, Pandora and Spotify.
Do you use Google Music at all?