I want my Google Music!

Google hopes its sprawling empire will soon extend to television and music, but has had little luck convincing the incumbent players to play nice with its products. As a back door, it seems Google is planning to produce its own content. It's throwing $100 million into original programming on Youtube, and today Google launched its own music blog, Magnifier.

The site is intended to get users signed up for Google Music, the cloud storage locker which is still in beta. On the homepage today, Magnifier is offering free tracks from My Morning Jacket and The Walkmen for anyone who signs up for Google Music. 
The site is shooting for a hip, editorial voice:

Wondering what Magnifier is? Well, when I was in junior high school, I had a friend whose older cousin lived in England, and that cousin would always send my friend great new records we usually knew nothing about, except that if the cousin liked them there was a very good chance we would, too. That's how we first heard the Clash's debut LP, Closer by Joy Division, and countless other albums I still treasure today.

So, Magnifier is basically Music Beta's cousin who lives in England, except that we don't actually live in England, and you don't have to wait weeks for new packages to arrive via air mail. Because we’ll bring you new free music each and every day. Sometimes it will be songs you haven't heard of by artists you have. Sometimes it will be new artists we think deserve more attention. And sometimes there will be video interviews and live performances. But you can always count on the following:

• You can add any or all of the songs to your Music Beta library instantly
• You can do this for free
• The artist is being featured because someone on our team thinks they're pretty great

We hope you enjoy browsing through all these free songs and videos as much as we enjoy bringing them to you.-- Tim Quirk, Head of Music Programming

Got that? Google Music is your cool older cousin from overseas who sends you punk albums with naked ladies on the inside of the record sleeve. Or at least, a giant corporation trying to be that in order to lure you into its music service. But hey, its free music, and artists are getting paid. So if you're an early adopter, what have you really got to lose (besides street cred)?

"If the sound quality of a particular song on a user's hard drive isn't good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version."

Because Apple is planning to charge a subscription fee for this service, it won't necessarily need to differentiate between music that was purchased legally and pirated tracks.

"Users will be able to store their entire music collections in the cloud—even if they obtained some songs illegally. That would finally give the labels a way to claw out some money on pirated music," writes Bloomberg.

The music labels are trying to leverage Apple against the unlicensed lockers launched by Amazon and Google, which is ironic, since they spent the last ten years watching in horror as Steve Jobs and iTunes became the gatekeeper for music in the digital age.

But the buzz this weekend has been about Apple, which has reportedly locked down deals with three of the four major labels. Having a service approved by the major record labels is key, because it would mean Apple can help consumers avoid the lengthy process of uploading every song in their collection individually. Instead, Apple can simply scan users collection in iTunes and approve those tracks to be played from the cloud.

Of Google and Amazon, Eliot Van Buskirk wrote over at Wired. ""Those services are hampered by a lack of record label licensing, and as such, they are essentially glorified hard drives: You have to upload every song yourself — a process that can literally take up to a week, hogging your computer’s processor and your internet connection’s bandwidth, as I have discovered by testing similar services."

To Buskirk, this seems like a tactical calculation on Apple's part. By waiting for Amazon and Google to launch without liscenses, it was able to get better leverage negotiating with the labels. It also enabled Apple to read the early reviews and see where the pain points developed with consumers. Just as it did with the MP3 player, Apple is entering the market late, but with a superior offering.

It's clear that the RIAA won't relax its campaign against digital file sharing, even if gives a pass or partnership to the titans of the industry. The music industry bully just went after Box.net, a fairly innocuous service for storing any kind of file in the cloud.

Infographic via Ashley Angell