Google Expands Its Empire Into The Music World

Google gets ready to piss Apple off (some more) and takes on iTunes. Oh, and Amazon too.

Google actually launched its music service last November, but it hasn’t really taken off. In fact, since majorWarner Music was holding out, the whole thing was hampered by a lack of good music.

That has now changed, since Warner Music has finally agreed to start adding their catalogue of songs to the library of downloadables from Google Play.

However, it’s not iTunes that Google needs to worry about bringing down, but the Amazon Cloud Player service, which has up till now been the music-streaming app of choice for Android users, since iTunes is not available with Android. The release of the new Google Play services comes with the release of the latest Nexus devices running Android, so they’re going to need to pinch users away from apps they’re already using on their Android system.

The updates to Google Play also increases the world-wide reach of the new music service. From the Google blog:

On November 13, we’re bringing music on Google Play to Europe.  Those of you in the U.K, France, Germany, Italy and Spain will be able to purchase music from the Google Play store and add up to 20,000 songs—for free—from your existing collection to the cloud for streaming to your Android devices or web browser. 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.

What do the Android users out there think? Do you use Amazon Cloud Player, or some other music app? Do you think you’ll start using the Google Play service instead or alongside whatever app you already use?

[Via Mashable]