Gizmodo - Google Music is out of beta and it pretty much does everything we thought it would. It will let you buy, store, stream and share tracks you already own. Sounds familiar… maybe because it’s an entirely unoriginal idea.
Not impressed.
Tying a music store to a storage locker is not enough anymore. The technologies might be current, but the ideas behind Google Music are tired. An a la carte music store? A storage locker? MP3 lending? Guh. These concepts are all old. More to the point, they’re DONE. If, as a company, you’re going to improve on an existing product, well, that’s awesome. Thank you. But if you give us more of the same shit we’ve already had for years, we’d kindly ask you to leave Thunderdome. In a body bag.
Speaking of old and tired, were you really pining away for another a la carte music store? Probably not. Most of us have been buying tracks from iTunes and Amazon for years. Why would we switch? Especially when the shelves aren’t fully stocked: Google Music only has three of the four major labels on board. And the fourth, Warner, reps a whole mess of huge names. Like it or not, music stores are commitments these days; getting your tracks from one to another may not be impossible, but it takes *some* effort, and people are lazy. You gonna hitch your wagons to Sony, EMI and Universal? Gonna fill that storage locker with The Offspring? More
