Google Play Music gets serious: adds more songs, primes for European launch

Despite the fact that the press launch was cancelled due to hurricane Sandy, Google still débuted its new Nexus phone, larger tablet and an updated Android OS yesterday. And nestled near the end of the official Google blog post detailing all the new Nexus products, was a sign that Google Play’s previously US-only Music offering is getting serious, with more cloud storage and more songs, in more countries around the world.

Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile and digital content, announced that the company had signed a deal with the Warner Music Group to add their entire music catalogue to Google Play, and that it’s working with independent musicians and major international record labels to grow its music store globally. Come 13 November, Google Play will allow Android users in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain to store up to 20 000 of their own songs in the cloud, and sync them across all their devices.

Google Play’s new matching service, which will launch on the same day, scans your existing music folders (or your iTunes library), matches up the songs you already have with their counterparts in the Music store, and adds them to your cloud-based library automatically. You don’t need to upload them yourself, or pay a cent to Google to store, match, sync or listen to your music.

As Tech Radar points out, Amazon and Apple charge you a yearly fee or put lower limits on how much of your music you can store in the cloud.

The tech giant is also working on filling up the Play Store with other digital content like movies and magazines. Previously, only US residents could buy movies on Google Play — now it’s a service that will be available in Canada, the UK, France, Spain and Australia. Google is also working with Time Inc. to bring more magazines to its store, including InStyle, People and TIME.