Rating: Sell your music directly to fans
Regular readers of GoMo News will know that we actually managed to join the Google Music Beta service before the company spotted the loop hole (proxy servers). [See our previous story 'How to convince Android market your in USA.] So, from today [November 17th 2011] only our readers in the USA will be able to access the full Google Music store and actually purchase tracks. The service claims to offer some 13 million tracks from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI. Of course that leaves BMG and Warner out which is a little surprising. If you’re in the USA, you can visit the Android Market now and download the Google Music app. Google wants you to share your music with friends on Google+, naturally. We’ve managed to download the app from outside the USA, of course.It’s worth having Google Music without being able to shop, of course.
That’s because you can load your existing collection of free and paidfor music up into the cloud (up to 20,000 tracks) and then listen to them from any device.
All you need to fool Google into letting you download the app outside the USA is to put a US SIM card inside your handset and then connect via Wi-Fi. You still won’t be able to purchase from the shop, though.
GoMo News performed this trick by taking an existing Cingular SIM card to a High Street store and getting them to cut it down to micro SIM size so that it fits inside our loan Motorola Razr (XT910).
As Andy Rubin, senior vp for mobile with Google says on the official blog here, ” We’re celebrating our launch with a variety of music that you won’t find anywhere else, much of it free.”
The list includes the Rolling stones, Busta Rhymes and Coldplay. Significantly, an artist called Tiësto is offering up a new mix, “What Can We Do?” (feat. Anastacia), exclusively to Google Music users.
This happened thanks to the Google Music artist hub, which enables any artist who has all the necessary rights to distribute his or her own music via the Google Music platform.
All a peformer has to do is use the artist hub interface to build an artist page; upload original tracks; set prices; and sell content directly to fans. Simples.
Our only gripe is of course, the payment mechanisms. You have to use Google Checkout and the unbanked are totally uncatered for, again! When are these guys going to learn about operator billing?
