Google begins testing Google Music internally
Google has begun testing Google Music internally, a sign that the much anticipated service is nearly ready to launch. — Google employees have begun a process commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as dog fooding, when employees try …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Music has been a rumor with a deadline problem: CNET reported in June 2010 that a music store could launch that fall, and a July 2010 report tied it to Android 3.0's Q4 2010 window — neither of which happened. By March 2011 the project had slipped past both targets, and the open question was whether licensing talks or engineering was the bottleneck.
Internal dog-food testing is the classic signal that engineering has handed off from building to polishing, which reframes the delay question: the software side appears close to ready, leaving rights negotiations as the likeliest remaining gate. It also sits inside a wider Google content push — a rumored effort to line up an NBA deal, a movie studio, and celebrity partners for its video platform — suggesting the company is working the licensing circuit on several fronts at once.
First-order effects
- Google employees now run their daily listening through the unreleased service, meaning the product's feature set is effectively frozen and bugs, not architecture, are what remains to fix before public launch.
Second-order effects
- A launch would put Google into direct competition for digital-music spending against established stores while giving Android another default hook — consistent with the 2010 plan to ship the service alongside an Android release.
Third-order effects
- With advertising supplying 96 percent of Google's revenue, a music service only pays off structurally as ecosystem glue that keeps users inside Android and Google accounts — pushing the industry toward services priced or bundled to defend platform position rather than to turn a direct profit.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are extending into licensed music distribution chiefly to lock users into their operating-system ecosystems, with rights-holder negotiations — not engineering — setting the launch calendar.