Google Music & Amazon Cloud Player’s Music Industry Snub May Signal Winds Of Change

Google has recently managed a rare shake-up of the digital music landscape (is there any other kind left anymore?).

Although considering Amazon pulled something fairly similar not that long ago, we’ll just go ahead and change “rare” to “infrequent”. And as always, it’s the tech companies versus the rightsholders.

The novelty is that Google is backing Amazon’s play despite using a different approach. And while they’re not exactly teaming up, it seems Steve Jobs’ iTunes marked the end of the era when tech giants allowed themselves to be hamstrung by the extortionate and/or downright absurd demands of the music industry.

But how have we come to yet another paradigm when the old one was fading away and the new one was just settling into place? People were just getting used to buying their mp3s from the dollar menu either on iTunes or the Amazon Store. The odd subscription service like Zune Pass would make the occasional appearance, with quirkier alternatives like Pandora and Last.fm bringing up the rear.

Make no mistake, the driving engine behind iTunes’ enormous market share was Apple’s relentless and harrowing negotiations with record companies. Thousands upon thousands of lawyer man-hours and retainers went into every deal that Apple successively struck in order to populate their game-changing digital store. And now its biggest competitors are hoping to leapfrog its whole ecosystem by cutting out the middle man so completely you would barely know he even existed.

Now the main concern is getting you to upload your music collection to the cloud and streaming it from anywhere, especially on mobile. Nevermind that will still kill your battery, incur data fees and stop your music in its tracks (this is the only pun, promise) if the signal drops as is its wont in, oh, just about every major city. Oh no, your music needs to be online so you can feel safe in the knowledge that you have it all with you, even if you are better off listening to it off your device in the first place.

Google, of course, knows this, which is what makes the fact that you can also download your tracks off Google music its best feature.

But what do they stand to gain? Well, Google and Amazon need the leverage in negotiation with Sony BMG and the rest of the music industry. Because while Amazon may be talking a big game about just how little it needs to talk licensing with Sony, they’re still trying for it anyway, since the mother of all lawsuits is all but a given at this point. And seeing as how neither of them are known to skimp on lawyers, it’s still anybody’s game.

Also, having your listening habits completely monitored isn’t that bad for their business either. It’s just another advertising tool in Google’s arsenal, like scanning your emails for keywords and gathering your location data.

Image courtesy of Flickr user yassef