10 May 2011 | Author: C. Tate

Google challenges Spotify, iTunes with music streaming service

Google's new music service, Music Beta, and will allow people to upload their music to the service and listen to it on smart phones, computers and tablets.

However, the company does not currently have the cooperation of music labels, meaning users cannot share music with friends or buying songs from Google, according to reports.

Google's Jamie Rosenberg explained to the New York Times why they didn't team up with the labels for the service: "A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable, and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable basis."

"So we're not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult."

Amazon launched a similar service in March and has come up against the same problems in that the record companies will not grant licences to them.

Ideally, the services would keep a copy of every song, which would allow the user to access the songs they own without having to upload the track themselves. However, neither the Amazon or Google will offer this service in the near future.

Google could have launched at a later date in an effort to get some record labels on board, but the Amazon announcement may have forced their hand, experts have speculated.

"If you're faced with another six months of brutal negotiations and your competitor just launched this, you just get in the market and get a lot of users," said David Pakman, a digital media investor for venture capital firm Venrock, who also spoke to the NYT.

How these two services will perform without the blessing of the record labels against competitors such as Spotify will remain to be seen.

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