Google Music, Something New is Something Old

I received my invite for the Google Music beta test and took the service for a test run. After receiving the invite, I signed in, downloaded, and installed the upload client. To test things I decided to upload just over 4GB of music I had on my hard drive. On a fast network connection with huge bandwidth this process took about an hour to complete. Once all my songs uploaded I went to the music player page. Once there, I have to say that's where my enthusiasm waned. There were my tracks, nicely loaded and categorized by artist and genre, but the interface looked pretty sparse. I tinkered with the play list functionality. I found the instant mix feature somewhat interesting. It's a version of iTunes Genius List feature. Basically, it creates a play list based on a selected track. It attempts to pull other songs from your library that are similar. Mood music as it were. There is an option to access free songs but nothing showed up when I selected it. I listened to a few tracks, created an instant mix play list and that was that. Playback sounded nice and I noticed no degradation of track fidelity. The other way of playing tracks is through an Android app. I haven't tested it out but from my reading it allows for the same functionality as the on-line player. Additionally, if you are off-line the mobile app allows access to recently played songs or songs you designate to be available off-line. I'm assuming it downloads those songs to your phone in some background process. All in all I like that Google has thrown its hat into this arena. I'm a big proponent of having access to your music in any way you wish, but to me, that's pretty much all I'm finding Google music to be, just another way to access my music. I find Amazon Cloud Player a lot more interesting. I think the ability to buy a song and have it immediately added to your Cloud Player library is a huge convenience as well as having the ability to download songs whenever and where ever you choose. Also, the fact that Amazon Cloud Player is tied to its Cloud Drive service is nice. Amazon's ability to store additional files other than music, and the generous storage space offerings, seem to relegate Google Music to being just an ordinary music player. That being said, if you live in the Google ecosystem it's not a horrible addition to their service offerings.