Received my invite to the beta of Google Music yesterday and just now getting it set up…

The setup is fairly simple after a few radio buttons to choose your iTunes folder are selected.

However, the uploads are painfully slow. After about an hour, I’ve uploaded 18 of 4,699 songs from this Macbook… going to be a long upload process and I doubt if I’ll fully commit to it.

Overall, the player is what you’d expect from Google-gineers. It’s functional and interesting.

Yet, I’m in the Apple-verse and don’t have an Android phone, so the mobile interface is a little janky considering there is no mobile interface for iPhone (or iPad)…

So my initial verdict is that Goog Music is promising, but with iTunes on iCloud coming at WWDC next week, it looks like Apple is going to mop the floor in terms of user experience. I simply cannot see myself using this everyday since I am an Apple fanperson (might be different if I were on Android).

Even if I weren’t, I don’t see how this competes well with services such as MOG or Rdio (or even Pandora) since you can literally hear anything on demand for a few pennies a day.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see these types of changes to how we collect, curate and consume music… it’s been a long time coming and I’m glad it’s finally happening in 2011.