Google Music Service to Compete with iTunes, Launching with Xoom?

Posted 02/23/2011 at 6:54am | by Paul Lilly

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Who would have guessed that Apple's main competitor would be Google, not Microsoft? Yet that's the shift that's taking place, odd as that may have seemed just a few short years ago. Gone are the Mac vs PC commercials, perhaps because the battlefield is now on the mobile front where Google's Android platform dukes it out Apple's iOS infrastructure, both on smartphones and now on tablets. Now we hear that Google's taking this knock down, drag-out platform fight to the world of music and plans to launch a new service that will go up against iTunes.

It's called "Google Music," and while we've heard about this before, we didn't know how Google would go about pitching its new service or when exactly it would come out. Thanks to Sanjay Jha, chief executive of Motorola Mobility, we now have a pretty good idea.

"If you look at Google Mobile services [via Android] today, there's a video service, there's a music service -- that is, there will be a music service," the U.K.'s Guardian quoted Jha as saying.

Jha went onto say that Google's upcoming Honeycomb platform, which kicks off with Motorola's Xoom tablet, "adds video services and music services," seemingly indicating that Google Music is just around the corner. And if you believe that where there's smoke there's fire, then it's worth noting that Billboard magazine recently published a list of executives at Google believed to be involved in the Google Music project. One of those fellows is Andy Rubin, a VP of engineering who supposedly told music execs the new service would include an online store.