Google Music Beta Cloud Streaming Service: Has Piracy Just Gone Wild?

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Google’s 2011 I/O developers’ conference is now over and after having covered it thoroughly for you guys, like we do with any major events in the tech world here at TFTS, we’re still not done talking about the products mentioned during Google’s keynote, and we won’t be for quite a while whether it’s Honeycomb, Google TV, Ice Cream Sandwich, Chromebooks or Google’s Music Beta service.

We have already showed you what Google Music Beta is, but here’s the short version: it’s a virtual space on a hard drive owned by Google where you can store all your music files. After that you’ll be able to listen to those tracks from anywhere in the world and from any device that’s connected to the Internet. That’s pretty neat, right?

It is if you have any music. Google Music Beta doesn’t let you (yet) buy any music from any of the big labels via a Google storefront. It’s not yet an iTunes competitor, not even an Amazon rival. It’s just a huge database that can be filled with music files, and that’s any kind of files.

Whether you purchased the music or whether you downloaded pirated copies off the Internet, as long as you have a Google Music Beta account, you can upload and play everything later from your connected device(s). I don’t think that Google has any way of determining which music files have been legally purchased and which ones are illegal copies, and even if they did, who’s to say they have the right to mess with the files you’re storing online, on your virtual drive, anyway? We wouldn’t want to see Google get involved into another privacy-related mess, would we?

So is Google indirectly aiding and abetting music piracy? Well that’s clearly not Google’s intention, but just an unwanted side effect, at least for the time being, of this unborn music service. Because there is no Google Music yet! It’s Your Music on Google’s servers. And if you take away the Music from Google Music Beta, you get Google Beta, which is not exactly a product, at least for now, and I’ll explain.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive basically does the same thing Google Music Beta is proposing, and while one could argue that Amazon is also helping people store illegal music files, the company is, at the end of the day, officially selling plenty of music and uses the Cloud Drive service to actually increase those sales, a process which appears to be working. Not that this is an excuse for music labels to drop their concerns regarding Amazon’s cloud music service too and that doesn’t mean piracy concerns should go away just because one is also allowed to sell music.

Google could be using this whole Music Beta launch to soften the hearts of the big music labels out there and convince them to endorse the Google Music project and make some money in the process. After all Google doesn’t want just to offer you some storage space for your music. It wants to sell you the music which you would then store on its cloud.

Google needs the music deal to better fight Apple, when it comes to providing content to the masses, especially in the mobile business. After all, one missing piece of the big Android puzzle in its contest with iOS is a decent iTunes rival. iTunes offers music, TV shows and movies, apps and eBooks. And that’s why Google desperately needs a deal with music labels, since it already has plenty of apps and eBooks, as well as YouTube movies. But in the mean time it’s going to fake a music service by calling it Google Music Beta and hope people won’t notice it could harbor copyright-infringing content.

Now if you plan to use Google’s Music Beta to store pirated music, I’d advise strongly against it, although, at the end of the day it’s up to you to decide how to use the service. In fact, before starting to use the Music Beta you might want to check out Google’s Terms and Conditions first, just to make sure you cover all your bases.

After having seen Google and Amazon launch their cloud-based music streaming services, we can’t wait to see how Apple will proceed with its own iCloud music service, and I have a feeling Google, and Amazon, are both pretty interested in how Apple is going to handle this music in the cloud business.