New York Times (blog) - Google Said to Be Planning an MP3 Store

Google Said to Be Planning an MP3 Store

Five months after it introduced a cloud music service with limited capabilities, Google is in negotiations with the major record labels to expand that service and also open an MP3 store that would compete with Apple and Amazon.

According to numerous music executives, Google is eager to open the store in the next several weeks. It would most likely be connected to Google’s existing cloud service, Music Beta, which lets people back up their songs on remote servers and stream them to mobile phones and other devices, said these executives, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private and continuing.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment, and the labels also had no official comment about Google’s plans.

Google may be hoping to announce its store before Apple opens its latest cloud music program, iTunes Match, which was unveiled in June and is expected to be operational by the end of October. But it was unclear whether Google would be able to close the necessary deals with labels and music publishers in time to open a full-service store.

Its earlier negotiations with music companies, for a so-called smart locker service â€" a Web storage system that lets people link their digital music collections to a vast central database â€" broke down over financial terms and the music companies’ complaints that Google was not doing enough to curb piracy.

Now Google is aiming for a more extensive service, but the labels and publishers do not feel that all of their concerns have been addressed.

“We want to make sure the locker doesn’t become a bastion of piracy,” one senior label executive said.

To operate the most efficient kind of locker service, a company like Google needs special licenses from the music copyright holders. Having failed to get licenses from the labels and publishers, Google opened a scaled-down version of Music Beta in May, and its executives publicly criticized the labels for blocking the deals.

Music Beta was announced five weeks after Amazon opened a similar unlicensed service, Cloud Drive.

Apple got licenses for iTunes Match, which will instantly link a user’s songs to Apple’s master collection. With an unlicensed service, users must upload each song individually, a process that can take hours or even days.