Google Music Beta

I personally haven't had many problems with storing my music collection locally. Unless you're a massive music geek that ripped every old cassette and CD to MP3s the minute hard disk storage passed the 1GB mark, I'm guessing your entire collection still fits on a 16GB MicroSD card inside your smartphone. If it doesn't, you probably have something like an iPod classic with one of the old mechanical hard drives in it, and that's been suiting you just fine since the late 90s. So who exactly is in the market Google is entering with Music Beta? Before I answer that question, let's look over what exactly Music Beta is and what it intends to do:

Essentially it's Google's cloud mentality.... for music. And by cloud I don't mean the Amazon MP3 cloud, where you purchase your digital collection from Amazon themselves and it automatically gets transferred to Cloud Services. No, I mean that Google is pretty much just taking your local music collection and putting it on their servers. That is nearly all there is to it. Of course there is playlist management and *some* discovery of new music in what limited deals they have managed to cut with the big labels. But for all intents and purposes, you upload your music collection to Google, they hang onto it and let you stream it to any of your authorized devices in a painless and very quick manner.

I was surprised to see that almost every song I uploaded was immediately recognized by Music Beta and when I added something to my library, it populated in my CyanogenMod 7 toting HTC Vision within 5 seconds.... Yeah, wow. Streaming was amazingly smooth over T-Mobile's "4G" network without a single hitch that I couldn't blame on the wireless carrier itself and the quality was maintained. I don't believe that Google is recoding on the fly in order to save bandwidth since that would require a higher cost in computing power versus the bandwidth they'd save.

Past that is where it gets fishy. I haven't found a way to delete multiples of songs if they aren't in the same album, pick which "free" and completely random music it gives me, or pick what songs are available for streaming to my mobile devices. If I turn Music Beta on within the app on my phone, EVERYTHING shows up, whether I want it that way or not. I also have no way of telling what's stored locally and what's in the cloud. It all shows up in one humongous list.

So again I ask the question, who is this for? I can think of three categories: The person with 18 computers they take everywhere and may not understand how to create a home network, the person who is still rocking the 2GB MicroSD card that came with their phone 2 years ago, or the person with a massive 20,000 song collection who HAS to have all of it on the go at a moments notice.

I think these people are few and far between. If you can't organize or purchase anything through Music Beta, you are automatically putting off 99% of your target audience, since I'm assuming Google is aiming for more than the three categories I previously mentioned.

Google has a really, really, really long way to go assuming the concept for this product was on a much more broad scale than it turned out to be at this particular point. If they consider this close to the final product and it's just bug fixes from here on out, this is quickly going to die.