The Google Music Store
Rumors again that Google is getting ready to deploy a music store. This time all the rumors come down to the opinions of a single analyst who noticed that Google was having a party with the music industry executives.
Right now, I don't see how a Google Music store would make sense. The main market for an online music store is to fill all of those digital music players (people don't buy music to listen just on their computers anymore - if they ever did). The problem for Google is that 85% of the portable music players are Apple iPods or shuffles which use Apple's DRM. Apple doesn't license their DRM and doesn't like people messing around with it (Apple threatened to invoke the DMCA when RealNetworks tried to get their DRM'd songs to play on an iPod). So that leaves Google scraping for the other 15% of market that uses Microsoft's PlayForSure DRM. They'd be competing with Rhapsody, Yahoo, Walmart, Virgin Digital and just about every other mom and pop. There just isn't any marketshare left to make it profitable. So how could a Google music store possibly work? Well .. here are some ideas:
- Google makes their own branded iPod clone that they give away to music subscribers (like Amazon is planning to do)
- Google gives the music away and makes their money selling advertising.
- Google provides some really compelling music search and discovery tools that no one else can match.
- The courts (or France) forces Apple to license their DRM