Google will launch Google Music today, stream users’ music to their Flash-enabled droids

Amazon may have beaten them to the punch but Google is still launching their long-rumored cloud-music service – called Music – today at the Google I/O conference. Google Music will serve as a digital locker, where users can store their songs and stream them over the Internet on any device. The Google I/O conference is set to start later on today – 5pm London time, to be exact.

This, much like the Amazon Cloud Player, is happening without a deal with the music studios… That means that users will have to upload songs they’ve bought elsewhere – and they won’t be able to download them on another device, they can only stream them (to prevent people using Google Music as a way to spread privacy). Also, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there’s a lawsuit just around the corner.

Anyway, Amazon have linked their Cloud Player to Amazon MP3 online music store by adding an option that copies over every purchased song over to the Cloud Player. Google doesn’t have a similar service however, so Music will be a purely passive locker.

It will offer more storage though – 20,000 songs (limited by number rather than storage it seems) rather than the 5GB you get for free from Amazon.

Google Music should roll out as soon as next week for US consumers – and it would launch as a Beta service (anyone surprised?). Google’s Android OS will support the player, though it’s almost certain that the service will use Flash, so droids with Eclair and below most likely will not be supported (at least initially).

iOS devices too (Amazon updated their service to support it) though Apple is rumored to be working on a similar service – and they’ve already signed two of the four major labels, so Apple users are probably not missing much here.

Google Music should be supported on the desktop too though laptops have plenty of storage for music and there are better ways to sync music folders among laptops.

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