The Android music market went live today. I've been pretty happy with the Google Music service throughout the beta, and the addition of a music store is quite welcome. Track/album prices seem pretty competitive with iTunes, and the service itself is free. They only have a subset of the major labels on board so far, but it's still a pretty large selection.

So far, I've just added some of the free tracks to my music library, which means I can listen to those on my Android phone and on the web, but I don't think there's any way to sync purchased tracks to PC libraries, which means no closing the gap between the cloud and the empeg, among other things.

Still poking around it a bit, but so far, so good.

Oh yeah, it's out of beta too.

Of course, all of my music library is in Apple Lossless, which wasn't ( / isn't?) supported by Google Music. I need to try again, or just suck it up and make a giant transcoded mess of my files to upload.

20K files is enough to upload maybe half of my collection, so I'll have to be picky...

Tony, I haven't looked myself (I'm on vacation), but are the prices actually competitive? To me, it looked like at best the prices matched iTunes, and certainly higher than Amazon.

I, too, have really enjoyed the Google Music Beta. It's nice to be able to stream my music anywhere, and it works very well. I just can't get excited about another store like this, especially not after spending a couple years with a Zune Pass. Too bad the record companies are still pretty behind the times.

I'm looking forward to poking around and seeing what free music they have available. I do like that you can give free one-time listens of tracks you buy to your friends. That's pretty cool. Do you know if that works for public postings or just posts to a circle or single contact?

Yeah, I said the prices "seem pretty competitive with iTunes" -- Amazon's probably cheaper for most tracks.

I understand what you're saying about yet another MP3 store. I've always been afraid of committing to a store where I couldn't easily get all my music out DRM-free. I bought maybe 5 iTunes tracks a long time ago, and have bought a handful of MP3s from Amazon, but believe it or not, I've actually done most of my MP3 purchases through AllOfMP3 and AllTunes. Firing up a Windows VM to download from Alltunes is kind of a hassle, though, and since I have an Android phone and have bought into most of the rest of the Google ecosystem, I'd definitely start using it exclusively if I could get the end-to-end sync including my empeg going.

I haven't done the sharing thing yet, as I don't feel like spamming the world with notifications of my music purchases. G+ better have an option for muting those / keeping them out of my stream.

It appears the new Google Music Manager for Mac can actually download all your purchased / free tracks an unlimited number of times, but it's not done automatically (you need to click "Download Purchased Tracks" and select a directory), and you can't tweak the directory/filename format, which is a bummer. If they added the ability to customize the template and let you choose a folder to auto-sync all new tracks to, it'd be the holy grail, and I'd gladly pay around double what I pay on AllTunes for the convenience and ubiquity.

Doesn't look like there's a corresponding update to Google Music Manager for Linux, though, at least not one that I could find (I was using my Linux machine to run Music Manager, but I'm okay switching to my Mac to get the download tracks facility.)