Internet search giant
Google Inc.
(
GOOG
) has introduced a music service that allows customers to buy
songs from the Android Market. The service is expected to compete
directly with its rival
Apple Inc.
's (
AAPL
) iTune services.
Google has now entered into partnerships with roughly 1000
record companies and thus can offer 13 million songs. Free
storage and streaming of 20,000 songs on Google Music remain as
part of the original service. In addition, Google will feature
reviews, band information and exclusive content from artists. It
will also allow the artists to design their own pages, which will
feature their videos, biographies and self-published music for a
one-time fee of $25.
Google has been improving its music service in the last few
months. Recently, Google Music came out with a new scan and match
feature to better compete with its rivals. The feature allowed a
user's music to be matched in the cloud so that songs could be
played on any authorized device. The service enables users to
upload their music to the cloud from their respective files.
The storage of music in the cloud is growing in popularity,
with iTunes offering space for 25,000 songs, Google 20,000 songs
and
Amazon
(
AMZN
) through its own service called Cloud Player 250,000.
According to the market research company, NPD Group, Apple
accounted for 64.0% of U.S. online music sales in the second
quarter, followed by Amazon at 16.0%. Google notched a mere 5.0%
share and other services made up the rest. While Google remains
far behind, its free service for the broadest selection could
gather momentum.
According to the market research company, IDC, Android
shipments touched 136.0 million units in the third quarter of
fiscal 2012, which is 75.0% of overall shipments and was followed
by Apple's iOS that accounted for 15.0%. Google is dominating the
OS space.
Google's rapid expansion into music, television, movies,
consumer items (rice cookers, refrigerators, cameras) is an
attempt to attract more users to Android. It is also going all
out to break Apple's dominance in online music.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2012, Google's gross revenue
(including TAC) touched a record $14.10 billion, representing
sequential and year-over-year increases of 28.6% and 45.1%,
respectively.
Total revenue, excluding total traffic acquisition costs, came
in at $11.34 billion, 4.4% lower than the Zacks Consensus
Estimate of $11.86 billion.
Google, Amazon and Apple all have a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
APPLE INC (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report
AMAZON.COM INC (AMZN): Free Stock Analysis
Report
GOOGLE INC-CL A (GOOG): Free Stock Analysis
Report
To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
Zacks Investment
Research