Rockin’ Out With Google Music
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You may remember me writing about the Google Music Beta back in May, and now it’s finally open for business.
It’s almost a decade too late to pose a threat to Apple’s very successful, longstanding iTunes Store, but you Android users might have something to be happy about.
Google Music allows you to buy, store, stream and share tracks you already own, and it’s fully integrated with the Android Market. The store offers more than 13 million tracks from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and the global independent rights agency Merlin as well as more than 1,000 prominent independent labels, including Merge Records, Warp Records, Matador Records, XL Recordings and Naxos. As with iTunes, average pricing for individual songs is 99 cents and $10 for an album.
You can purchase individual songs or entire albums right from your computer or Android device and they’ll be instantly added to your Google Music library, and accessible anywhere.
You also can download free exclusive music from the Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Busta Rhymes, Shakira, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band and Tiësto.
There are a total of about 20,000 free songs. You can share your songs with your friends, but they can only listen to it once (kind of as a free trial or try before you buy).
In addition, a unique feature is the Artist Hub. For a $25 fee, this allows you (whether you’re on a label or a do-it-yourselfer), to distribute your own music on Google Music. You can use the Artist Hub interface to build an artist page, upload original tracks, set prices and sell content directly to fans, essentially becoming the manager of your own music store. This goes for new artists as well as established ones.
For more information, or to get started, visit music.google.com and market.android.com for the new music app.
Note: You need to be running Android 2.2 on your device for it to support Google Music. Also, TMobile customers with Android phones can buy music without having to enter any payment information it will show up on your cell phone bill.
Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: IconSettings for iPhone
Many of my iPhoneowning friends users are gun shy when it comes to jailbreaking their phones.
For those of you who are hesitant to go through with it, IconSettings for iPhone offers you some of the benefits of jailbreaking your iPhone without having to actually jailbreak your phone.
Technically, IconSettings is not an app you can download from iTunes, but it’s a bookmarklet that can launch specific settings from your iPhone’s home screen.
You save a premade bookmark to your home screen and whenever you tap it, you are brought straight into the specific setting you want.
For example, if you want to adjust your Wi-Fi settings, you just click on the Wi-Fi button within the app, and it will immediately launch the Wi-Fi settings pane on your iPhone.
It also works this way for many of the other common settings that you would want
iPhone: http://iphoneza.co.za/IconSettings/.
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