I got my invite today to try for “free for a limited time” Google music. One of the first things you have to do is pick out your preferred music genres. They are rather varied and except for Rock (Alternative, Heavy Metal, Classic) most things have only one large category i.e. Country is listed as Carried Underwood AND Johnny Cash. There isn’t any Western Country, Classic Country or anything else so while I love Waylon, Johnny and Roger I don’t really care for Keith Urban and Tim McGuire but I’m in that pool as well.
Thankfully the “free music” for Jazz is pretty good with Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington as well as Louie Armstrong but surprisingly no Parker, Davis or Marsalis. White musicians who played Jazz are under Big Bands and “Easy Listening” which I guess works for Glenn Miller (Big Bands) but I am not sure about Gene Krupa who while a drummer in bands also did his own crazy thing. So the genre thing really isn’t polished yet.
So to really see how it compares to Amazon’s Music Cloud I am uploading the same 5 meg in many subfolders, complimentary of RealPlayer, which Google does not acknowledge either, and I will see what happens. For Amazon that took about 18 hours. I went to bed and when I woke up it was still going. With Google Music it was just as slow and since I started early in the day, I just went with a few hundred MP3s and that was done in about an hour.
Stay listening.
