"Google will launch music streaming in the cloud this week"

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is preparing to launch their cloud-based music streaming service as early as this week. The long awaited service by Google is expected to resemble the Amazon Cloud Player that was lanched at the end of March of this year. Google is likely to announce the service today at its annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco.

Google had announced they are developing a music player earlier, but the release of the service was delayed by negotiations on licensing agreements with major record companies that hold the copyrights for the music Google wants to offer. Google, like Amazon, still hasn’t secured the necessary licenses for a music service from the four major recorded-music companies, according to the Wall Street Journal. It will be interesting to see whether this week’s announcements will mean copyright arrangements have been made, or copyright arrangements are no longer on the agenda.

In the latter case, the Google service is probably a "passive" locker. Such systems generally are believed by people in the music industry not to require licenses from record companies. Users of such a new service are expected to be able to listen to songs they have uploaded to a ‘locker’ in the cloud in a so-called streaming mode but won't be able to download the files themselves. That limit appears to be a bid by Google to hinder the service from being used to spread pirated music.

The service could be connected to an online music store in the coming year, which gives users the option of adding new songs to their music locker at the time they buy them. Competing music service Amazon Cloud, for instance, is considered by many in the industry to be a first step toward a more ambitious offering that Amazon could create once it has licenses in place. With licenses from music companies, a locker-service operator could give users instant access to songs stored in central servers, rather than making those users upload every song in their music collections. 

Read more: Wall Street Journal