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Lou Pickney's Online Commentary

Music Beta

Monday
June 13, 2011

This past Friday afternoon a nice surprise arrived in my email inbox: an invitation from Google to try out its new Music Beta cloud storage program. I signed up for the early tryout about a week ago after someone who I follow on Twitter talked about being accepted for early entry. And, so far, I've been impressed with what I've seen.

Once you click on the link in the invitation email, you are prompted to download a Music Manager program by Google. This program allows you to decide what folders you want to upload your music from, and then the process begins. If you have quite a bit of music in your collection, as I do, this can be a slow process. It took three days or so to upload all of the songs in my possession.

Interestingly, the Music Manager directed me to the Opera browsing system for my music player. I'm surprised it didn't initiate Google Chrome, but it's possible I gave Opera default rights for music programs or something similar at some point by mistake. Luckily, it seems that Music Beta runs fine through Firefox, my typical go-to web browser.

Before the program actually launched, I was prompted to get some free music packs for genres that were of interest. I chose alternative, rock, pop, and hip-hop. At this point I'm not exactly sure what songs it added to my "Google Cloud" or whatever they end up calling this forthcoming technology of large remote file storage with many points of access, hub-and-spoke style.

At this point, the jury is out on Google's Music Beta. Once I try it remotely (via my Droid) and also when I can check out how the "suggested" music option, I should have a better handle on the situation. In addition, it remains to be seen how long Music Beta remains a free offering from Google; at some point it could become a pay service, something that Google was forthcoming about from the drop.

Music Beta has a relatively basic logo design.
While Google has been a knockout success in the world of search engines, making Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves and more recent competitors like Microsoft's Bing look second-rate by comparison. That's not because of flashy graphics; Google is relatively simple in layout, the way that I typically like my sites to be, both those I design and those I visit. But Google delivers search results more accurately than anyone else as of right now, and they have a team of very, very smart people constantly tweaking their search engine to become more and more refined and, as a result, provide the best results to a given query almost immediately.

Not everything that Google has tried has worked. For example, Google purchased a program to allow people to be able to buy radio advertising online. Radio station involvement was tepid to a degree, in no small part because a good ad executive can be worth his or her weight in gold, and putting the squeeze to them could be a bad thing.

Personally, I loved the Google radio ad purchasing program, which was introduced as a separate section within its AdWords program in 2007. It intentionally didn't tell you what stations your campaign would be running on, at least not until after a spot had run on a given station, though someone like me who knows radio markets and the major players in a given area could really game the system. I tried their radio buying program out in late August 2007, buying time to promote my friends Rich Karg and Andy Karg's band. The whole thing was a blast for me, everything from bidding out the production of the ad to deciding where and when to run it.

In theory it was a win-win system: unused inventory could be sold by radio stations and clever buyers on a tight budget could run their spots in a variety of markets. The idea was that the buyer wouldn't know what station his or her ad was running on until after the fact, but it became easy (particularly after using it for just a little while) to figure out which stations in a given market were participating -- and also the stations that were actually *outside* of a stated market that were lumped into it, like how at least a couple of Cookeville stations ended up in the Nashville category.

By the end of my run with Google's radio purchase program I was able to buy airtime on a modern rock station in Chicago for literally pennies on the dollar. It might have been in overnights and with a limited audience, but I doubt I'll ever see a better deal in radio than the times when the Karg Boys ad ran at 5:45 or 5:50 a.m. Central Time on modern rocker Q101 (WKQX) in Chicago. Even with a large section of the potential audience asleep at that hour, I figure that enough people were waking up to start their day (and flipping on their radio to help with the process) to make it well worth the per-spot cost to possibly hit the sweet spot on that final half-hour overnight stopset.

Ultimately, the low-stakes nature of the program proved to be its undoing. Decent-sized companies didn't need the headache or hassle of using Google to buy spots; there are companies out there that handle such things. Moreover, many radio stations didn't want to risk even the possibility of undercutting their ad executives -- or their own bottom line. Ultimately, the decision came down by Google to shutter the program, and that was that.

While there are some failures on Google's tab, there are enough riches from the success of having the best search engine in the world coupled with the revenue from AdWords and AdSense to make it worth the company taking chances on emerging technology. And, while they won't always work, ideas that are forward-thinking and innovate are the proper ones for a company that has made its bread on the cutting edge of the internet to chase.

The jury is out on Google's Music Beta, and it will be for some time, at least until the public has a chance to try it out and compare it with similar offerings from Apple and other companies. Speaking of Apple, one important note to keep in mind is that Music Beta doesn't play ball with either M4P (Apple DRM) or M4A (Apple Lossless) files. So, for those of you who were willing to buy DRM-protected music from Apple, you're out of luck in having those files work with Music Beta, at least at this point.


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