Apparently I wasn’t cool enough to warrant inclusion at the outset of Google Music Beta but now they’ve decided I’m worthy. I got an email last night inviting me to check it out and I’ve only just gone through the process (on a Windows machine) to set it up. While the process was relatively painless (and they even include some free songs to test with, hooray!) I see now why it’s still in beta.
I’ve clicked two or three different songs and while they appear to be ‘playing’ I’m not hearing anything through my speakers. I haven’t spent enough time with it yet to say whether or not I’m going to dig it, but I have a feeling that iCloud is going to be my favorite not because of a natural Apple bias, but because i can’t stream any of my Google music to my iPhone or any other iDevices and that’s just disappointing. Competition with Apple or not, there are millions of iOS users out there and if Google could do the music thing better (see: free-er) than Apple then I’d think iOS would be a great platform to illustrate that.
Oh well, let’s see if Billion Dollar Babies will play now!

I forgot to post this yesterday, but I thought all of you should know that after having been in beta for years the fine people at Google have decided that Gmail and its other apps are ready for prime time. You can read more about Google’s decision to finally remove the ‘beta’ label from its apps over at the