Yesterday Google announced Google Music. The service wraps a music discovery and purchase platform around their existing Music Beta by Google service that lets users upload (up to 20,000 songs from) their personal music collection to the cloud for streaming playback:

Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library—both purchases and uploads—across all your devices so you don’t have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space. We’ll keep your playlists intact, too, so your “Chill” playlist is always your “Chill” playlist, whether you’re on your laptop, tablet or phone. You can even select the specific artists, albums and playlists you want to listen to when you’re offline.

There’s a stand-alone Google Music app. But, like the recent roll-out of books from the Google eBookstore onto the Android Market and Android Market app, expect music content to start appearing in the featured tiles on the market. Soon you will be able to buy music directly from your Android device (running Android 2.2 or higher):

The store offers more than 13 million tracks from artists on Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and the global independent rights agency Merlin as well as over 1,000 prominent independent labels including Merge Records, Warp Records, Matador Records, XL Recordings and Naxos. We’ve also partnered with the world’s largest digital distributors of independent music including IODA, INgrooves, The Orchard and Believe Digital.

One difference to other platforms like it, Google Music makes recommendations to you based on what you listen to, not just what you buy. And speaking of buy, Google has launched Artist hub as part of Google Music which gives musicians and labels the ability to build an artist page, upload original tracks, set prices and sell content directly to fans.

Even cooler, when you share a purchased songs on Google+ the entire song is able to be played back by your friends (although it can only be played back once).  If you want to know more about Google Music, I totally recommend you check out their HMTL5 tour. Each topic you view adds visual elements and a different music sample to the soundtrack of the tour. It’s pretty ace!

The down side though: unfortunately, the new music service is currently invite only and limited to the United States only! :(

♺ Andy Rubin,’Google Music is open for business‘ on Official Google Blog, 16 November 2011.