The New York Times writes that Google will showcase the service at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco later today (Tuesday) and, so far, has no deals with labels or publishers in place.
The Google Music service is expected to debut in invite-only beta today and offer users free storage space for up to 20,000 songs (with storage calculated on number of tracks rather than GBs). It will then open to US consumers in a matter of weeks.
Users will be able to upload their content and then stream it to connected devices. TechCrunch says there will be a Flash-based web player that will work with ChromeOS and the music service is baked into the Music application on Android versions 2.2 and higher, which can also store songs locally.
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The NY Times quotes Android's head of digital content and strategy Jamie Rosenberg as saying, A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable business. So we're not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.
