A few months ago, Google rolled out a service to the UK called Google play Music where you can upload, then use up to 20,000 songs to their cloud – free of charge. Once uploaded, you can access the tunes from wherever, whenever (pending an internet connection). You can download them to your device (phone, mp3 player, computer, etc.) or stream them directly from the service via a browser or an app on your android or apple device.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of the weekend uploading mp3s from two old MP3 players that have been gathering dust and I’ve started ripping all of my CDs (an ongoing project) and uploading them. I’m hoping to collate my entire collection there and put my physical CDs in deep, deep storage (I don’t think I’ve go the heart to get rid of them completely). One of my favourite features is the ‘scan and match’ feature. In effect, a lot of the quality of my music has just been upgraded to 320kbs because Google scans the tracks I’m uploading then if it’s already got it in its 18+ million strong library, it replaces it in my cloud collection, with the higher quality version. Nice!

Google play Music is also an online store – (that undercuts iTunes by 20p per song for the same product) and a premium instant listen service called All Access – a  service comparable to Spotify. So far, I’ve found it very pleasant and easy to use – perhaps too simplistic would be a crit – it’s not quite as granular as Spotify in the way you can sort stuff, but it’s still great for doing the job of finding and playing music. I’ve got a fair bit of work to do to tidy it all up – but as I’ve said before, here on DragonDrop.org, File Management is the new Rock n Roll.

Google has once again cunningly, almost won me over from another product that I’d invested a lot of time and money into – Spotify. As yet undecided. I’ve put a lot of TLC into scores of playlists in Spotify – all of the RIFE RADIO shows lovingly re created in there – which I intend to release somehow, someday, but for now, Google may well get my monthly subs and act as my go to man, for music.

Finally – yes I think I have used this image on another blog post – It was shot in the back of our van, at a festival that didn’t stop raining for the day so I listened to the output of both stages via the silent disco transmission, who’s headphones I had plugged into a little set of speakers. The silent disco headphones look a bit like the Google play Music logo but in pink not orange. So there.