Best Buy announces own Music Cloud service

It seems like everyone has their heads in the clouds these days. With a growing emphasis on synchronizing media purchases and applications on multiple mobile devices and computers, retailer Best Buy is launching Music Cloud.

The service is available for devices powered by Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry operating systems and requires downloading software that enables music streaming.

The desktop app copies libraries and playlists from iTunes on a home computer and puts them in an account to be accessed on multiple mobile devices. It's powered by Catch Media's Play Anywhere service.

"With Best Buy Music Cloud, your digital music lives in one place but you access it from wherever you are," according to the Best Buy web site. "Enjoy all your music when you're at a friend's house, in the car, on the bus, walking to work ... virtually anywhere."

"You can store your favorite songs and playlists for when you're offline," it adds. "You can select just a single song, a playlist, or even an artist, allowing you to continue listening when you don't have coverage."

The premium version is available for $3.99 and, a demo version is available with 30-second playbacks of your songs.

Best Buy's Music Cloud comes on the heels of Apple rolling out iCloud to synchronize media purchases across computers and its mobile devices. iCloud was the major announcement by CEO Steve Jobs at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month. Google and Amazon.com have also launched cloud music services.

Earlier this month, at the E3 conference, Best Buy announced a Reward Zone Gamers Club that offers points toward purchases.

Google all set to launch online music

Google could launch a new online music service as early as Tuesday, which will be similar to a service recently started by Amazon.com Inc, The Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Journal said Google is likely to announce the service at its annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco, adding that the service will operate in a testing mode initially and not be available to the public at large.

In April, Amazon unveiled a service that allows customers to store about 1,000 songs on its web servers for free instead of their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection directly from web browsers.

The Journal said Google has not sought licenses from the four major recorded-music companies and the new feature is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive.

Users could listen to songs they have uploaded to the service in a "streaming" mode, but will not be able to download the files.

Google-owned YouTube said it will add more than 3,000 mainstream movies for users.

Google to launch online music in India

Google Inc plans to launch an online music service in India that would enable users to search for legal music streams and downloads.

Google is looking to add music feature in its search service, which will allow users in India to search for songs.

The top search results would be from Google's partners. The U.S. web search giant will partner with three digital music providers, who hold rights to hundreds of thousands of Indian tracks ranging from Bollywood hits to Indian classical music.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters outside regular U.S. business hours.