Rumors about a Google Music service have been making the rounds for years, but could it actually become a reality at the search giant's annual developer conference today?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will finally announce its online music streaming service at Google I/O later today, and it will look much like the cloud-based music locker recently unveiled by Amazon.
As a result, Google has not secured licenses from music labels for its music service, the Journal said. Like Amazon, Google is expected to frame its offering as a cloud-based locker where people store music they already own and stream it to a variety of devices. When Amazon introduced its Cloud Player, the company said it did not need licenses because people were accessing their own music.
Apparently, Google explored the option of licenses, but could not come to an agreement, according to a report from All Things D's Peter Kafka.
"Unfortunately, a couple of the major labels were less focused on the innovative vision that we put forward, and more interested ... in an unreasonable and unsustainable set of business terms," Jamie Rosenberg, digital content and strategy chief for Google's Android platform, told ATD.
The Journal said Google Music users can upload and stream their content, but cannot download it, a move intended to avoid music piracy issues. Amazon's Cloud Player is connected to its MP3 store; music purchased via Amazon MP3 does not count against a user's upload limit. Google, however, probably won't tie its service to an MP3 download service, according to the Journal.
One of Google's first forays into music came in October 2009, when it unveiled a music search feature that included in its search results streaming music clips from partners like MySpace, Pandora, Rhapsody, and the now-defunct Lala and imeem. There were reports that a more Google-centric music service would be included in Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and an April leak of a test version of the Android Market prompted renewed speculation about Google Music, but so far no announcements have been made.
PCMag will be at Google I/O today, so stay tuned for all the news.
Update: It's official. See Google Unveils 'Ice Cream' OS, Music Service at I/O.