I’ve only spent a few minutes on Music Beta – and only about 10 minutes listening to music from Magnifier. If you’re unfamiliar with either or both services, check ’em out here:

Music Beta: http://music.google.com/about
Magnifier: http://magnifier.blogspot.com

Basically, my thoughts are simple:

First of all, Music Beta successfully ruined my first listen of Rachael Yamagata’s song River by blipping the crap out of it. I have 24 mbps download-streaming internet service, so I’m guessing the real streaming problem of this very delicate tune was on the content delivery side – not on mine. Seriously. Ouch.

But here’s what I find to be the real problem:

Google says, “Add new and exclusive tracks to Music Beta for free” and in their promotional literature, they repeatedly say Music Beta is “your music library” and “your personal music library”….  I find that hard to believe – and as far as I can see, I’m right.  Here’s why:

Yes, only *you* have access to the songs. Yes *you* can organize them into playlists – just like in iTunes. BUT – and here’s the kicker: your songs are stuck in cyberspace and you can’t download them on to your computer – even if they are in *your personal music library* that is called Music Beta.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it looks like even when you make content available offline on your Android device (is it available for iPhone?) you CAN’T play songs OUTSIDE of the Music Beta app – meaning: they aren’t YOUR songs – they’re stuck in MB. Unless I’m missing something, there definitely is NOT a feature to download songs to your computer or make content available offline on your computer.

So I argue here that the feature to “add free songs to your library with Magnifier” is totally and completely dumb. They in no way become MY songs.

At least Spotify doesn’t try to tell users they OWN songs that they merely from within their program.