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The music world was always dealing with the rise in downloads and the loss of digging into physical, tangible albums, and I think those insane 3D interfaces were a coping mechanism. Google’s UI only responded to the gauntlet thrown by iTunes’ equally swoopy “Coverflow” UI.
Excluding beta: a music store and a new app
The beta ended after six months and on November 16, 2011, “Music Beta by Google” became “Google Music”. The service is open to everyone in the United States, no invitation is needed.
While Google was unable to negotiate a deal with the record companies during the beta, for the official launch, the various billion dollar companies put their differences aside and decided to sell us all the music. was actually a good idea, so Google got its music license.
Well, he’s signed a deal with at least three of the big four labels. Universal, EMI, Sony and some smaller labels all signed up and brought in 8 million tracks, while Warner Music held on for an entire year. Independents didn’t need a record company at all – they could sell music through Google’s new “artist corner”, which would list independent songs on the store exchange for a 30% discount.
Google celebrated the beta release milestone with its new friends in the music industry and threw a star-studded party with titles like Drake, Busta Rhymes, and Maroon 5. There’s a whole story about it. in The Hollywood Reporter.
The license meant that Google launched a music store in the Android Market, offering pay-per-view MP3s at 320kbps for $ 0.69 to $ 1.29 each. The store existed both on the web and on Android, and music purchased on any customer instantly synced with all other customers. The Android Market was starting to look like a serious store and sold apps, movies, music, and books. Music purchases can be processed through Google Wallet or, if you’re a T-Mobile customer, can just be added to your monthly bill. As part of the default app store that ships on every Android device, Google’s media store had broad reach once it was rolled out in your country.
The non-beta launch also meant a new Android app with a new design. With Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google was all-in on a Tron– inspired blue laser beam theme and new Google Music app have followed suit. While the beta still looked very gray, the new Android app (version 4.0, to match the latest OS) was very, very blue. This now-dead service also got a bunch of integrations with other now-dead Google services, like easy sharing on Google+ (killed in 2019) and a Google TV app (killed in 2014).
The Google Play era
In March 2012, Google decided that “Android Market” was not a great name for products that also worked on the web on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thus, Android Market has become “Google Play”.
All media stores have also become Google Play, so in addition to the Google Play (app) Store, you have Google Play Movies, Google Play Books, and Google Play Music. These are all really annoying brands, but things would only get worse in the future. The current transition of Google Play has changed little more than branding. Everything has a new logo, including shiny new gold earbuds for the new Google Play Music.
Google I / O 2012 in June saw Google (Play) Music celebrate its one year anniversary as well as the announcement of the Nexus Q, Google’s first hardware with a strong emphasis on music. The Nexus Q was a crazy-looking futuristic multimedia sphere that ran Android and, in addition to streaming music and videos, was an amplifier for bookshelf speakers. When everything was plugged in, it looked like one of those spooky, squid-like Sentinel robots from The matrix.
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