Today, Google sent me an invitation to Google Music Beta. Until today, I was not a part of the limited number of users allowed in to play around. Launching quietly among all the buzz about Google+ and Google +1, Google Music is yet another attempt by Google to steal a huge user base. This time, Apple is the target.

What Is Google Music?

Google Music is a way to make your music collection available from anywhere you are. Because you upload your music collection to Google Music, it’s on the web for you to access from any computer or Android device. According to Google, it’s “A better way to play your music.”

How Do I Get A Google Music Invite?

When I first saw the Google Music Beta landing page, my first thought was that I wanted to dive in and play around. Of course, it’s in Beta, so they are limiting who can get in. I signed up to be on the list for an account and just a couple days later, I received my invitation email. Head to http://music.google.com and request an invite. If they open it up by time you read this, you should go right to your music collection to start adding. At the time of this writing, there are no invites being handed out to anyone other than via the invitation request system.

Google Music Features

In its infancy, Google Music Beta has one main feature: Play your music from anywhere. Beyond that, it doesn’t really have any ground-breaking features that are going to change your life. It has playlists, the ability to give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down, listings by song, artist, album or genre, and lots of information about the track. So, yeah. It’s like iTunes on the web.

In my quality time with Music Beta, I did find a few features that I thought stood out a little. While playing music, you can navigate to the next and previous tracks with the left and right arrow keys or use the space bar to play or pause. Additionally, the up and down arrow keys, home and end and even the page up and down help you navigate through the list while the backspace or delete keys will remove a track from your collection.

Google also added context menus to tracks to help you add songs to playlists, buy music, etc. My favorite part is the instant mix which just makes a quick mix playlist from the song you chose and other songs Google thinks compliment it. Finally, like in iTunes, you can select multiple tracks with SHIFT+click or CTRL+click and drag things around to make stuff happen. While testing, I dragged a whole album to a playlist to add it quickly.

To get your music into Google Music, you need to install the desktop application. It finds tracks from a selection of locations (I chose my iTunes library) and works like mad to upload them all. If you want to give it a test run, you can create a folder with a small selection of tracks and just import that or you can do like I did and go for broke. If you have a large collection, like me, you should be prepared to wait and keep in mind the 20,000 track limitation Google currently imposes. Seven hours after starting, only 3,400 tracks from my collection have uploaded. The upside is that it doesn’t choke up your computer’s bandwidth, processor, or memory as it quietly churns away in the background.

What’s Missing?

Social sharing : GrooveShark and Pandora set great examples for music sites with ample social sharing options. Google Music Beta doesn’t even integrate +1 or Google+ sharing, but I’d rather see Facebook and Twitter as a minimum. With the existing APIs, it should be really easy to build in.

International availability : At last check Google Music is available only in the United States. With a project like this, it’s probably just a matter of Google getting all the kinks worked out and then working through any legal barriers for offering a music service in other countries.

More keyboard controls : That there’s keyboard controls at all pleases me, but I kept looking for a way to fast forward or rewind with the keyboard. I’d also love to see shortcuts for common actions like SHIFT+Up Arrow to give a track a thumbs up or ways to add to playlists without the mouse.

While it’s not something I expect Google to take care of, I had a number of tracks that would not import because they had the old DRM ball-and-chain from iTunes. Actually, Music Beta intelligently recognized the DRM tracks, refused to import them, and provided a report about them in the desktop application. You can always burn those tracks to CD, rip them back to your computer, and re-import them without the DRM later.

Early Conclusions

The feature set is a little underwhelming, but the concept is exactly what I want from online music… MY music when and where I want it. Everything worked well, too, but I’ve heard others complain about the user interface. Google is touting it as “free for now”, but with an ad-supported option and some polishing, this will completely replace everything else I use to listen to music.