14 DAY TRIAL // Google Music, the store plus the streaming service and cloud locker, is a fairly run-of-the-mill if solid product. One thing that is interesting and original about it is that Google is enabling independent artists to upload and sell their own music in the store, completely under their control.
Google provides the tools to upload your songs and create your Google Music artist page. You get to set the price for your music and Google keeps 30 percent of the sales.
"With the Google Music artist hub, any artist who has all the necessary rights can distribute his or her own music on our platform, and use the artist hub interface to build an artist page, upload original tracks, set prices and sell content directly to fans—essentially becoming the manager of their own far-reaching music store," Google explained.
"This goes for new artists as well as established independent artists, like Tiesto, who debuts a new single on Google Music today," it said.
Setting up an artist page is relatively straightforward. Artists have to pay a one time fee of $25, €18.5 to set up their profile. This fee, just like the one in the Android Market for developers, is designed to keep out spammers and the likes rather than make Google too much money.
After the one time fee, it costs nothing to run your artist page. You can upload as many tracks and albums and do as many changes as you want.
You get to set the price for the songs you upload, you can even give them away for free. The revenue from the sales is split 70/30 between the artist and Google, just like with developers in the Android Market.
There are alternatives to the new Google Music artist hub, Bandcamp for one. And they take a smaller split of the sales as well. But Google has a huge reach and the music store will end up on every Android phone out there, not to mention the Google+ sharing features.
