“Google is expanding the size of its celestial jukebox,” Victor Luckerson reports for TIME Magazine.
“The company announced Wednesday that users will now be able to store up to 50,000 of their own songs for free using Google Play Music, up from the previous limit of 20,000 songs,” Luckerson reports. “The songs, which can be uploaded directly from a user’s iTunes collection or other local music folders, can be played on iOS devices, Android devices and the web.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The ball’s in your court, Apple.
Come on Apple, Google gives15gigs free storage, MS gives 25 or so.
Sent from my iPhone
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Free and no aggregation of users data or use?
People will just have to rename their songs slightly to throw off simple aggregations. 😛
It’s a good thing Google still has its main source of funding coming from DARPA, NSA and the CIA otherwise it would be bankrupt by now.
I don’t think a person needs more than 10.000 classic songs. Apple users have a beeter taste… Google users have a beta taste.
Youtube 1.000.000.000 pirated songs.
What’s with the commie comment that a person only NEEDS 10000 songs. I really hear someone actually spew that out?
Watch out, the commies are coming. There one right behind you. Dang, you missed him. Whoa, there one behind the bush, look out.
Needs? You don’t *need* any songs at all; you *need* air, water, food, shelter, etc.
I have nearly 200Gb of music, this piddling amount is worthless to me, but then, I couldn’t give a shit about cloud storage and access to my music, the shonky 2/3G networks and extremely patchy data coverage renders such a system virtually unusable in any day-to-day situation.
Coupled with the fact that iTunes Match downgrades the bitrate, it becomes unacceptable to me.
Give me 250Gb free storage with my music at least at the 320Kb bitrate it was ripped at, or even better, Lossless, and I might consider it.
How much of that music did you PAY for? How much did you ‘borrow’ from others or the internet?
Ten thousand songs at two minutes per song, if played back one after another during one’s waking hours, would consume fifteen months. If they were contemporary pop songs, one might need to be institutionalised.
Actually, it is not at all hard to listen to 500 songs in a week, yielding 26,000 songs heard in a year. That’s a little more than 4 hours a day if the songs average 3.5 minutes.
Here’s the thing that probably drives Apple’s “completion” nuts. Apple doesn’t care so much if you use Google Play instead of iTunes Match. Or buy ebooks from Amazon instead of iBooks Store. Or use some “Microsoft app” instead of iWork. As long as you are doing it on an Apple computer or mobile device.
Apple cares about selling you the hardware product. The services are offered to add value and enhance the customer’s experience. They are NOT meant to be Apple’s profit centers.
For the competition, the services ARE the profit centers, and user experience is a secondary consideration. Therefore, they will be annoying and intrusive (to wring out every possible dollar of profit), while Apple’s equivalent services only strive to keep you as happy and loyal customers for the next round of Apple hardware, and profit (from the service) is a secondary consideration.
If that were true, why would they require 30% of in-app purchases of music, ebooks, etc. which resulted in Amazon, Kobo, etc. making eReader/player-only Apps (no in app purchase feature) for your media purchases? Fact is Apple DOES want a cut and not simply provide a service to host free Apps for such vendors’ enrichment. iPhone HW sales would more than make up any ‘loss’ from such in-app purchases.
The 30% for in-app purchases is ONLY if you want to use the ease of the Apple ecosystem (with hosting, storage, pricing, payment all built in). They’re not going to do all of that for developers/media producers for free.
If you want to make things available off the store (Mac OR iOS), you’re welcome to set up your own servers and payment options (with the fees that entails). At the end of the day, though, if you’re an Apple developer, you’re still paying $99 a year to be in the developer program. 🙂
So which part of hosting, storage, pricing, payment does an Amazon App have support of from Apple for ebook/media sales? I don’t think Amazon is exempt from the annual $99 developer fee so can submit free apps for placement in the Appstore, by storage I suspect you mean of the media purchased but that is also on servers Amazon own and maintain, by pricing Apple has no control of what prices Amazon sells ebooks or what they decide their App is priced at, perhaps payment though that would mean that it goes through 2 layers of payment if they have to accept payment via Apple before going through their own payment systems.
Reading comprehension issues… 🙂
I did not say Apple wants to provide services for free, or that Apple does not want to profit from a service. I said profit was a “secondary consideration.”
The iTunes Store no doubt makes a profit, but it did not become the world’s biggest music retailer by trying to be a profit center for Apple. It (along with Apple Pay, software products, Siri, iCloud, etc.) are value-added services. When Apple can provide major OS upgrades for free (with no ads or customer data mining), it’s a big advantage over Microsoft and Google who must derive profit from equivalent services. When “breaking even” is fine for selling digital media, Amazon is at severe disadvantage.
Maybe, but when you think 30% on sales of in-app virtual/electronic goods that are never actually stored on servers Apple controls or maintains, it seems a lot of profit for being a storefront provider, something any normal brick/mortar store would be hard put to call a secondary consideration. 😛
I think it’s fair. An independent developer would pay more to make their product visible and accessible to potential customers. Time is money, and they can spend their time developing apps and supporting customers, not setting up and maintaining systems to monetize their product (or paying someone else to do it). And when paying a “cut” to Apple, that is AFTER a sale. If you “do it yourself,” you are investing money and/or effort in advance without certainty about prospects for sales.
Also, from Apple’s perspective, the revenue pays for the entire operation, including distribution of free apps that do not provide a “cut” for Apple. In turn, having a consolidated and safe “marketplace” for ALL apps helps sell the paid apps.
I can accept that an independent developer with no name/brand to speak of would benefit from the exposure, however in the cases of companies like Amazon and Kobo with their ebook Apps, they are well known already and have their own servers to handle the backend required for purchase processing of ebooks. Now if their Apps sold other iOS compatible Apps, I could see a reason for such a charge. Or possibly even an for an ebook for sale in the iBookstore that has a 1-click button to directly purchase the same book at Amazon. I would also think the ‘stickyness’ of having a full-featured ebook app that allows in-app purchases would worth more than the burnishing their reputation receives for implementing the policy. As it is the iOS versions of those Apps (still free) become simple ereaders to access the ebooks they have bought via the browser site anyway.
I think Apple designs its services to encourage participation in creation. It would seem like a betrayal if Apple granted special exemptions to the “big guys,” just because they are big.
Again, I am NOT saying that Apple is intentionally trying to run “non-profit” services or “play fair” with Amazon (by putting a silly links to their store in Apple’s store). In fact, Apple uses every advantage to crush the competing services. Apple’s services play by a different set of rules, because profit (from the service) is not the primary goal. That distinction gives Apple an key advantage, and going back to my original post, “probably drives [them] nuts.” It’s hard to compete with Apple, when Apple isn’t even playing the same game.
Can you actually upload 50,000 songs though?
I tried to use Google Music about a year ago. I left one computer running their uploader app for 4 days straight. In that time, it only uploaded about 2 GB of music, which is a small percentage of my entire music library.
I gave up on using Google Music after that point.
Stop using AOL dial-up you’ll get faster uploads!!
I have broadband. The slow down was definitely not on my end.
If it doesn’t do it in four days . . . leave it on for five days or more! 😀
I guess some folks will think some of us are a bunch of cheapskate losers that just want stuff for free for wanting Apple to do something similar.
It’s just another scheme to harvest more personal info from you. Use it at your own risk.
It doesnt matter to me, as iTunes Match is the only service available in India and both Google and Amazon arent here to force me to ditch iTunes match. If and when they lauch in India then I will think about continuing on iTunes Match or not.