Can Google get any Beta?

Google has this month stepped up to the cloud by releasing its cloud based digital locker ‘Beta’ music service. In a similar fashion to Amazon's Cloud Player launched in March this year, no licensing deals with labels are presently in place for the service. Through ‘Music Beta’ by Google, music fans can stream tracks to Android devices including phones, tablets and computers. In the Beta stage of development, tracks available will be limited to 20,000 and the service is free to use.

Commenting on the lack of collaboration with labels, Jamie Rosenberg, Director for Digital Content for Android told the New York Times: "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 business”.

There is debate throughout the industry at the moment as to if such services should involve licensing from rights holders despite no downloads taking place and essentially no actual ownership of music possible due to tracks being stored in a cloud platform.

The big question is: are such services essentially providing a comparable experience to Spotify yet bypassing the royalty payment route? Google seemed to at least try and engage the major labels in the US but will now employ the same argument as Amazon - that users are simply purchasing hard disk space and therefore don’t need a content license.