14 DAY TRIAL // Google Play is centered on the Android Market, but the very reason for the name, brand, domain and logo change, is that it's about more than Android. In fact, with Google Play, Google Music may finally get a fighting chance.
Google Music was introduced about a year ago and, despite a solid set of features, it didn't set the world on fire. On the one hand, it didn't stand out too much, it offered free hosting for your music, up to 20,000 songs, which you could then stream to any device.
But, because Google had no deals with any music label, you had to actually upload all of the files. That's how it worked with Amazon's similar service, but, then again, that hasn't proven too popular either.
Last fall Google did finally strike a deal with the major music labels, just three out of the four, enabling it to start selling music and to match the songs you had on your computer to the ones in Google's cloud.
Again, the service was competitive, but that wasn't enough. It didn't stand out, it merely matched the competition, barely, and it didn't get much of a marketing push from Google.
It was built into the Android Market app, but recent rumors say that Google Music has been performing very poorly.
Google Play may give it a fighting chance, but barely so. Having a unified brand may help Android users, the hundreds of millions of them, discover the Google Music Store and the cloud service.
Of course, Google Music is only available in the US, so the potential market is of several tens of millions of people. But that's still huge, if Google can tap into it.
Still, it's just a name change, it may make it more visible, but the service remains the same. If the service proves something people want, that's great, if not, a name won't help it. In other words, if the problem were one of visibility, the move should help; if that weren't it, Google Music won't become an overnight hit.
