My head a splode. 

2011 is proving to be one of the most interesting years in music industry history thus far. 

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!!

 Yosuke Okazaki

Gonna be an iTunes killer?

The artist publishing tool is indeed very cool. I just started a band called Androidian, uploaded a song of myself burping out my A, B, Cs, and got myself hot indexed into the Google search engine ahead of Coldplay. This is truly a revolution in music discovery. More garbage for Mountainview to sort through and prioritize to page 9. I bet the search guys are working on it right now. DIY is the future!

+1 to this guy. 

don't be a hater. the garbage will weed itself out. Why would some idiot want to pay $25 dollars to crack a joke?

Stop with the "killer" crap. Too many of you think that just because something new is introduced it's a "killer".

 

I've heard it all...

iPod Killer, iPhone Killer, iPad Killer

and that never seems to be the case.

 

It's a good idea and  good service. Let it stand on it's own with being "a  killer".

Kudos to Google, but until the fat apple sings, its no iTunes killer!  My guess is that iTunes will jockey once the Google service begins to look like any sort of threat...

Or, maybe I should say "IF" the Google service begins to look like any sort of threat...  Hopefully it will, as competition cn only make things better (IMO).

 Ker Loon 

Google Music making huge waves. Anticipating industry response.

Vince Bannon 

google very interesting...

cory waldron 

this is amazing, google music, another transition in the music industry.

At this time, only USA artists can sign up at the Artist Hub.

Should iTunes eliminate the middleman? I think so.

Should iTunes allow artists/labels to set prices? I think so. With 4 majors dropping down to three, the majors will be under much heavier regulatory scrutiny and price control. In my opinion, artists/labels will have to legally keep prices even across all digital retailers where they set prices.

iTunes needed a competitor to compare products and improve.

 michael speck

Google wouldn't care, they consistently shown they don't care about anyone's copyright except their own.

I think we need to get over crowning things in the tech world as "game changers" until they can actually be proven as such.  Google Wave, Google Buzz, and Google+ have all been labeled game changers on launch by the media, but so far have proven the opposite.  There have been countless companies that have rolled out products that could potentially eliminated the DIY middleman, but they have not done so.  In fact, artist have been able to uplaod music directly to Amazon MP3 for years (hello Createspace?), but no one talks about it or really cares.  Have you ever thought that maybe these "DIY middle men" provide other services artist want or know the artist community better than a company like Google? As far as digital stores go, let's get real, iTunes is the golden ticket.

In my mind, what Google did today is more of a threat to someone like Bandcamp than CD Baby or Tunecore.  They gave artist an easy way to upload some tracks with a little more potential visibilty and a sales option.  It's useful if you just want to get some feedback or some demos up, but a real release still has to be on iTunes.  Both CD Baby and Tunecore announced that Google Music will be included with their standard distribution, so with no financial advantage to going direct with Google, what's the point?  It just becomes one more meaningless acount to manage.

One major mistep Google made IMO is that everyone is talking Google Music, the logo is Google Music, but the actual store is the Android Market.  A big branding screw up from where I sit.  I'm an iPhone and iPad user.  I don't know how the Android Marketplace works, and I certainly wouldn't think I was at the right place if I was an average music consumer.

I may sound like a Google hater, but I'm not.  I'm really pulling for Google+.  I think there are some obvious challenges and precident that anyone in the industry should spot.  It has the potential to be a game changer, but until they get people to care and buy music from them 6month to a year from now, it simply is not.

>>>
I certainly wouldn't think I was at the right place if I was an average music consumer.

>>>

 

unless you have an android based phone   ....   (which apparently has a higher market share than iphones/pads, so may be it makes sense to be available for android too).

So i pay my 25$ to google and then to itunes and then to spotify and then to wimp and on it goes.... then come royalty payout day none of them want to pay me cos all my accounts have sold for just under 50$. So now i am out a couple of hundred bucks and have sold for almost the same but have nothing. Hmmm, I think i might just want that single middleman as opposed to having about 15 of them :)

indeed. You should keep an eye on airbornemusic.com

Bandcamp has been doing this for ages.

Right, yeah, Bandcamp has been doing this, but Google just scaled it. For an artist thinking either/or, it's a no-brainer.

Rovi needs to get on the stick because they are biggest problem to accurate bios and other consumer-facing metadata and they have been the biggest problem. Still to this day they claim to be working on allowing labels and artists to correct their Rovi data which is what mostly every online store uses.

Agree. As someone who runs a label, I find it impossible to get Rovi to correct mistakes.

I bet Google's competitors (Apple, Amazon) are laughing right now at the DIY thing.  The customer service nightmares will be off the charts for Google.  They have no idea what they are getting into.  I fully expect you'll see a 'Sorry, the Artist Hub is unavalable temporarily due to high demand" followed by a sever increase in the $25 price or a cancleing of the service altogether.  Of course, that all assumes that artists line up to hand this money over to google.

 

I think the bigger question is whether or not Google is giving their music pages an advantage in their search results pages.  This is the forbidden fruit, in that doing so would undermine the crdibility of their cash cow (search).  At the very least, its hard to imagine that their music pages are as search engine optmized as is possible.

 

 

You speak the truth.  They have no idea what they're getting into when they invite the DIY crowd.  It's not in Google's interest to want to support that relationship.  I'm sure they picture the DIY crowd as all these tech savy independent artists that will be low maintenance.  They're about to find out otherwise.

I am not that sure. Naturally BuyMyPlaylist.com is not Google, but we have artist pages and upload options. More, within our service you can mix your own music with that of well-know artists to build and share/sell thematic and personal playlists, and we have not experinced any major problems.

A lot funnier thing is that we have this service for a year now, and we are yet to be called innovative. Google copycats everything and it gets away with it, with the music experts applading its  "new bold products."

I should clarify.  Supporting the DIY crowd is not a bad thing when you know that community and are working to help them accomplish their goals.  The problem is that Google really doesn't have an interest in helping that community.  They want to sell a lot of music and encourage people to use their cloud service.

I like the free cloud space for music, although I'm surprised to see any industry player take that route while the technology is new.

I really dislike startup fees. I would rather share revenue than pay money upfront I may never see again.

Small DIY players may realistically never make back $25, especially on an underutilized social media like G+.

Yanni Peary 

Google Music - Goya!

 nightmaresonwax 

Music industry shake up?

 LondonMusicMapp 

MUST READ

 Tim Regan-Porter 

Congrats Caren Kelleher.

 Samy Bendali 

ça ressemble à MySpace intégré dans l'iTunes Music Store

Wait, wait, back it up. 

What's DIY stand for O.o?

do it yourself

aka 'direct to fan,' as in not assisted by major record label, etc. no middleman.

that's the top level explanation hth

WTF is DIY?

Someone please send me a Facebook message when Google does something even viable, never mind game changing. The cloud storage is free and they offer thousands of free MP3s so this is gonna generate revenue how? Oh right I forgot from people sharing on G+ and purchasing on Android Market. REALLY?? When's the last time you bought something shared on any social network? By rolling out the Music store under the Android Marketplace Google just alienated millions of iOS users and failed to create any sort of brand or destination for music fans. I'm not even gonna go into the pratfalls of Artist Hub... Yikes!

its gonna make Google a metric ton of money in increased ads...

what its gonna mean revenue-wise to the artist is up to the artist (it IS D.I.Y.)

 

 

Hey Google. Want $25 per year? Make a service where I give you that $25 per year and you make sure my albums don't show up on your search results for piracy websites.

So, for $25 I can get my catalog distributed in the United States by NSA?

What a privilege!

Re: Google & DIY, how disruptive can they be unless Google were to provide DIY artist content received directly to all other DSPs? If say, MOG or Spotifiy alone took artist content directly, would that spell disaster for aggregators? Hmm, I don't think so...

Go get em' Google! Not a game changer..just business. Why all the complaints already? people always want more choices, then get scared when theyre offered..hillarious. just another pea in the pod guys..hope it works out for them. im always excited to have new avenues to share my music and hear and learn from others.sounds great and i doubt its gonna kill business for anyone. now if only i had more choices when it came to where all my tax dollars really go....thatd really be awesome.

"Sharing music" is not a business model for the artists, its a business model for Google (AdSense) and its partners (piracy websites).

this is the death of the music artist as we know him. and not a good one, if i may add. just because one _can_ fart, it´s not nececcarily good that everyone does it actually. but everyone will, which causes too much stink in an already waaay too crowded market, where good stuff is already more rare than ever.

Davey D 

Loving the way Google came hard w/ the Google Music program... Game changer?? I think so

You seem to be a person that is very easily convinced to make radical changes in his business. Why is that?

Peggy Dold 

VERY interesting article...

No WMG? No Sony Music artists?  Going to be a yawn for a lot of consumers.  (Search "The Beatles" and see what you get.)

 

Hope the DIY aspect helps starving artists but not going to hold my breath.

 Paul Porter 

Google soon to be the new iTunes.

Wes B aka Wes Beez 

Almost there now.

...and you support this ridiculous claim with...what...?

...hot air from datacenters...?

 

At first, I was going to go ahead and set up shop on our own, but then I realized: TuneCore (who we're already with) lets us distribute everywhere in one swell foop. I do think it's a very big deal that artists can DIY if they so choose, but for those already on TuneCore and the like, it may be fine just to let them distribute the tuneage. Same payday.

http://blog.tunecore.com/2011/11/launch-of-google-music-what-does-this-mean-for-you.html

As good as it looks, 30% is a big commission for infrastructure. I'm a bit hesitant as a musician to want to share that much of what my fans pay with a tech giant. I currently work with an online store who markets and organizes sales, shipments, etc and they only take 20%.

Google is asking the DIY musician/artist to pay $25 for their service fee but do they also take a percentage out of each single download sale of a song or album?

There is no way I am sharing my label's customers' details with Google/NSA. If they are interested, they can dig and find them through VISA, IRS e.t.c. But I am not giving them away voluntarily.

"Google just dropped two gigantic bombs..."

Bombs don't always explode, you know.

Kendell Renee, Esq 

Is this the shake-up the industry needs?

Shake up?! Please. Stop getting so overhyped with press releases from the IT mafia. A multinational corporation claiming they are...DIY. Yeah, right.

So, Google now likes artists, eh? OK. What about removing all those DMCA notices from Chilling Effects, then? No? You don't want to? You enjoy mocking our lawyers and managers? No problem, Google. Your loss...!