Google Music Store Review

Dec. 2, 2011

The Good

• Good prices
• Decent selection
• Tight integration with Google Music cloud service
• High-quality audio

The Bad

• Confusing to use in some places
• Purchases take too many steps
• Download errors

The Prices
Songs: generally $0.99-$129
Albums: generally $8.91-$11.49

For years, iTunes was the sole, dominant force in digital music sales. Then Amazon joined the fray with its AmazonMP3 store. Now a third major Internet force has joined the battle for our digital entertainment lives: Google, with its Google Music store. The store integrates tightly with Google's Android operating system and Google Music cloud service, but while it works with iOS devices, it's too clumsy right now to merit a recommendation.

If you've used iTunes or Amazon MP3, the process of using the Google Music store will be familiar. Go to the store, search for an artist or song, then sift through the results until you get to the page that lists what you want and allows you to buy. Nothing out of the ordinary here. No major innovations, but no stumbling blocks or problems either. Finding what you're looking for is easy enough.

Google Music's selection seems to lag behind iTunes and Amazon a bit, though it's on par with eMusic and Spotify. For instance, you won't find Metallica at Google or those last two, though both iTunes and Amazon have the band's catalog. Google Music only offers three Mountain Goats albums (and a strange selection at that), while the other services offer substantially more (though, to be fair, eMusic doesn't have any of the three Google does).

The compensation for the occasionally spotty selection, though, comes in price and quality. Songs at Google Music generally run US$0.99-$1.29, which is in line with the other stores, while album prices tend to be cheaper than iTunes and about equal with Amazon. For instance, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Murder Ballads: is $9.99 at iTunes, but $9.49 at Google and Amazon. Public Enemy's "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age" is $11.99 at iTunes and $11.49 at Google. Agalloch's "The Mantle" is $8.99 at iTunes and $8.91 at Google and Amazon. You get the idea: the savings aren't major, but they are there.

The other difference with Google is that while all its music is in the MP3 format, like Amazon, it's encoded at the very high-quality 320 Kbps (iTunes, by contrast, is 256 Kbps). It's an interesting choice: certainly it delivers better quality, but I wonder if the trade-off is worth it. A 6-minute song I bought from Google Music weighed in at over 15 MB, while a similar 6-minute song from iTunes was just 12.4 MB. One 15-minute song was nearly 35 MB. It's nice to have the higher quality, but the time it will take the download these songs, and the storage space they eat up, for me argue against such high encoding.

While the process of finding music is fairly identical at Google Music to Amazon or iTunes, buying it isn't. In fact, buying music from Google Music is frustratingly cumbersome. This may be because Google wants users to store their music in its cloud music service rather than download it. Either way, purchases should be easier.

When you find a song or album you want to buy, you click on its price. As with all stores, you first agree to the terms of service. Once you do, Google Music charges the credit card you have on file in your Google Wallet account (if you don't have one, you'll have to set one up). All fairly standard. But then things get funky.

Rather than downloading your purchase, Google Music offers to let you listen to it on your Android device or go to the cloud-based Google Music where the song is now stored. You can leave the song there to listen to at any time or download it--though you'll be warned that downloads directly from the cloud-based Google Music are limited to 2 per song. Fair enough, I thought, and clicked the download link. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. Finally I had to choose the "if your download doesn't start, click here" link. The download started and the song was soon automatically added to my iTunes library.

If you want to download a song more than twice, Google requires you to use its Music Manager desktop software. Thinking that would be simpler, I decided to download that, but couldn't find it. Turns out it's available via a link that says "Upload," which seemed confusing for something that had just been recommended as a tool to download. Turns out this is the program used to both upload and download music to your Google Music cloud account. Fair enough.

Once I had it installed, though, I still couldn't download. The first thing Music Manager attempts to do is upload your desktop music library to your cloud account. I didn't see a way to skip this, so uploaded a single song and then proceeded to my download--which caused another complicated process. First off, there was no clear download button. It turns out to be accessed via the "Preferences" menu (weird, I know).

Once I found that, the download was still tricky. Music Manager only showed 6 of my 9 purchases and only 2 of those 6 would download. I reset the downloads completely and then it saw all 9 and downloaded them (albeit very slowly since the files were so large). This time the songs didn't automatically add to iTunes (due to where I choose to download them).

Once I had the songs on my computer, though, they sounded great.

The buying process gets a little more complex at Google Music if you want to buy more than one song but less than an album.

I purchased the album that I did one song at a time to test the process. Instead of offering a complete-this-album feature which allows a one-click purchase of all songs (as iTunes and eMusic do), you have to buy each song individually. Which means clicking purchase each time, then agreeing to the terms of service each time, and authorizing a new transaction each time. Buying 8 individual songs took something like 24 clicks and 8 separate transactions on my debit card, rather than 1 smooth one. Not a deal-breaker, but not exactly frictionless commerce, you know?

Also frustrating was that some purchases just didn't work, returning errors that weren't explained. I was eventually able to try again and buy those songs, but I'm not sure that's ever happened to me at iTunes or Amazon.

It's always good for consumers to have more choices, especially in a market where one player (iTunes) dominated for so long. Thanks to the entry of Amazon into the digital music market, there are many more sales and discounts. Hopefully Google's entry can also help push some similar benefits out to everyone.

As it stands, though, I don't recommend that iOS device users try Google Music unless they've got a lot of patience. The process is just too clunky and clumsy right now. It may be better for Android or Google Music cloud users, but until Google can add some the niceties that iTunes and Amazon offer, it's a distinctly second-class store.