Will Google Music Be A Shit Show?

2010 has been a rough year for Google. Not so much on the cash side, they still have oceans of that. No, 2010 was a rough year because of Google’s great promises and bigger letdowns.

For musicians the most important Google Fail was Google Music. The great iTunes crusher, the anointed saviour of digital music, the Google cloud, the Google locker, it was all promised in some way to be here in 2010. But this year is finished in less than 2 weeks and Google will not be releasing anything remotely close to the hype.

Tech Crunch took a closer look at Google’s recent fails. They show a pattern of a company with so much money, so many ideas, and so much blind optimism (or ourbillionswillhelpusout-ism) that they don’t put enough work/thought/anyanotherfactor into getting things done in a quality way.

We know Google search is the best, so we expect the same amount of awesomeness for everything Google does. From cell phones to Google TV to digital music, I expect it all to be amazing. But 2010 was not amazing.

Google Music. Remember, it was supposed to launch this year. Google was just finalizing deals with the labels. It was going to be all in the cloud. It was going to be magical.

It’s so magical that it has vanished in front of our eyes.

So where is it? Again, this looks to be Google living in a bit of a dream world. They seemed to think that the labels were so eager to break Apple’s dominance in the space that they would just hand over their rights to all their music.

What they didn’t consider is that even wounded dogs are hungry. Actually, wounded dogs may be especially hungry. If they smell meat, they might just rip your head off.

Google was so confident in their ability to get this service going soon that they even talked about it on stage at their biggest event of the year, Google I/O — that was exactly 7 months ago. A few months later, when negotiations presumably weren’t going too hot, they brought in some big guns with experience to help. We have 11 days left in the year. It ain’t coming. (More here via Tech Crunch)

Perhaps this slow death of Google Music is a good thing. If you’ve seen how little artists actually make from the world of streaming (we are talking about cloud streaming) then Google Music probably wouldn’t change much. That fact plus the general disregard Google has show for most copyright doesn’t bode well for most musicians.

If Google finally does get into the digital music world I hope they execute it well. The reason that iTunes rules the digital music world is because iTunes is simple and focused on music first. Google has a million other massive projects going on and although they have the money for something like Google Music, that doesn’t mean they should tackle that domain unless they can do it right.