New Sources Confirm Google MP3 Store Coming this Quarter

There have been too many rumors about Google and digital music to count. The company has wanted a piece of this market for years, but so far, the furthest it got is with Music Beta by Google, a rather limited and unimpressive cloud locker service with streaming capabilities.

But that's finally about to change, according to a number of rumors these days.

The company is said to be negotiating, yet again, with the major music labels, but also small publishers, for an MP3 shop, in the most traditional sense.

The very latest rumor says that Google is aiming for a Q4 launch, confirming what others have said so far.

Some speculation has been made indicating that Google may be targeting a launch date to be close to the Ice Cream Sandwich launch or at least before Apple's iTunes Match streaming service lands.

Of course, MP3 download stores haven't been cool for the better half of the last decade, ever since Apple launched the iTunes music store.

Amazon has been struggling, with little success, to make money from its own MP3 Store and eat away at iTunes' market share. While Amazon sells a lot of music, it's not even close to iTunes.

And the fact that it's built its MP3 store into its new Cloud locker and streaming service, or, put it another way, the fact that Amazon Cloud Player has a built-in music store doesn't seem to have made much of a difference for neither products.

Yet that's exactly what Google hopes will happen, without a dedicated MP3 store, its music streaming service has been lacking and, launching an MP3 store that wasn't linked to some other service, except the Android Market, wouldn't have made much of an impression on anyone.