While Amazon is struggling to keep up with demand for their near-free $.99 sale of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" album, frustrating many people, it's interesting to note that Spotify, the on-demand streaming music service based in Sweden, has had the full album, plus an additional set of tracks, available for free to Premium users for some time, and there are no issues in getting to the music, just another great example of why US customers who don't yet have access to the site, are missing out, and why heavy-handed tug of wars with the music labels involving Google, Apple and Amazon are keeping the best tech away from users, thanks to record executives hoping to keep their inflexible business models from being eaten alive.

With today's headlines focused on Amazon's 'exclusive' offer, and the resulting server meltdown, it's worth noting that Spotify users actually gained access to the same set of music back on Wednesday, May 18th. In fact, the album is aged enough in Spotify's eyes to no longer be included in their "Brand New Albums" section, replaced by even fresher tracks.

While access to the service here in the U.S. is still limited to those with explicit access, it continues to the best streaming library in the world, this just being the latest example. Don't love Lady Gaga? You don't have to listen, but at least on Spotify you can.

At a Samsung Mobile Town Hall held in Sunnyvale yesterday evening, one of the company's executive vice presidents, Ho Soo Lee, EVP of the media solution center for Samsung, held court with developers and aspiring partners or future employees to highlight Samsung's position as the fastest-growing smartphone vendor, which has helped play a role in the company's growth to more than $130 billion in revenue for 2010, up 20 percent from the previous year, along with $15 billion in profit. To keep the company's position accelerating, Samsung is continuing its multiple mobile OS strategy, with Android and Bada being its one-two punch in 2011 with Windows Phone 7 also supported. But come 2012, the company has its sights set on a phone that is completely cloud-centric, much like Google's Chrome OS. To get there, Samsung is looking to tap Chromium, and has even considered approaching HP to see if they are willing to license WebOS.

Samsung, along with Apple and HTC, is one of the few handset manufacturers showing considerable market share growth in this competitive landscape. They achieved this with rapid release of handsets for a wide range of countries globally, support for multiple carriers in each, and platform leadership on both quality and quantity. The company's Galaxy S II model and the Galaxy Tab series (7 inch, 8.9 inch and 10.1 inch) are the leading options on the Android platform, going head to head with Apple's iOS. While the company has come under some criticism for slow release of Android milestone upgrades, and its proprietary approach to Bada, the company has achieved a 12.2 percent market share in smart phones, putting it in the 4th position worldwide.

As Lee explained to the packed room in Sunnyvale last night, the company's roadmap hopes to bring cutting edge features like WiFi display from the phone to the TV set, WQXGA support for high resolution tablet displays featuring resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels, 3D accessories and smart phones. One new wrinkle is their stated plan to bring a "cloud phone". Lee said that at this time, Chromium, the open source Web browser project from Google Chrome, would be considered, adding "we are thinking about how to get WebOS right now", an interesting wrinkle, considering HP hasn't yet announced plans for licensing the mobile OS, born out the Palm acquisition, to date.

On the question of slowed updates to Android, and why the company isn't offering a "stock Android" model, Samsung said their strategy is to have their own user experience (UX), believing that their proprietary UI (called TouchWiz) "is a benefit to Samsung's customers". They stated that there is a lot of commitment internally to the company to improve on their pace of upgrades, but also that there is a lot of work to test the upgrades against devices and carriers globally, in addition to the physical act of pushing out the upgrade.

The company called the mobile phone "the center of your social life", referring to it as the most important communication medium, with mobile devices getting stronger as cloud capabilities advance. But they also understand that it takes more than feature one-upmanship to gain customer loyalty - something Apple has proven for decades.

"People don't care about the technology." Greg Dudey, Vice President of the Visual Displays UX Lab at Samsung said. "They care about what it can do. The next two years, we see we are going to be combating the technology experience, but after that, the ecosystem experience."

Around noon on Wednesday, I fired up my old laptop, downloaded Google's Music Manager, and started the process of uploading my vast, but long-neglected, music collection to the cloud. Assuming the migration is complete, I'll have a Web-based repository for all the music I've purchased, as a companion to all the on-demand music I can find using Spotify - a match I like a lot. More than 30 hours later, thousands and thousands of my songs are on Google Music in beta. Yet, there are thousands more to go - highlighting a process that may be a challenge for users who may consider making a similar transition. And once they are uploaded, it's not clear if there's a way to get them down from the system if I want to move again.

My blogging colleague MG Siegler, he of ParisLemon and TechCrunch, argued yesterday that Google's move to open up a music locker (as Amazon did) without first gaining expensive deals with the music labels, has essentially locked up the market for Apple, who is quite unwilling to lose their leadership position in the market. He argued that the complexity of moving one's library to the cloud, instead of a simpler, faster way of matching your library to a known database and providing you access (as LaLa once did) would be a major stumbling block for the curious consumer. Putting MG's pro-Apple bias aside, there is some truth to that, if a known brand has a simpler solution and an official relationship with approved music downloads, the value to the cloud locker from a competitor is not obvious.


As you know, migrating one's library out of iTunes and to a secondary location, be it Google Music or anywhere else, cannot happen for DRM-locked content. To strip one's iTunes library of the DRM, one must first pay Apple upwards of $.30 per track to upgrade to iTunes Plus. For a library like mine with thousands of tracks, this upgrade can (and did) cost hundreds of dollars - a steep pair of handcuffs, considering one doesn't get any new music in the deal. Converting to iTunes Plus doesn't actually upgrade the songs directly, but downloads brand new tracks in their place, and you have the option to delete the old files.

With a goal of completing this process, come Hell or high water, I gave Apple more than $340 yesterday to upgrade 1,945 tracks - at the same time as I had already told Google's Music Manager to upload my non-DRM tracks to the cloud. After about an hour, Apple sent me an email to say my tracks were ready, and I could begin the downloading process. So I set my old Mac aside, and put it to work, downloading the nearly 2,000 tracks at the same time as Google was uploading thousands more. Good thing I have unlimited bandwidth...


With my iTunes library now fully Plusified, Google Music has full go-ahead to get my music and that's happening. At this pace, it's likely the first pass of my full library will complete mid-day or late tomorrow, about 48 hours after I started. This process would take longer if it were on my primary machine, doing other tasks, or constantly interrupting the move by putting the machine through normal on/off paces.

Assuming the process completes, I am excited to have all my music in the cloud, searchable and playable from any computer where I am logged in. But as one person asked me, what if Google Music goes the way of Google Wave? I don't think it will, of course, but what if I want to take my more than 50 gigabytes of music down from the cloud, back to a desktop, or move from this service to another?

One admirable passion Google promises is the support of Data Portability. Its Data Portability Project is focused on letting users move data in services and out of services. You can see the conflicts over data ownership flare up especially in the battle with Facebook, who let users pull in Gmail contacts, but didn't let Google do the reverse. So I am a little surprised to see there isn't yet a way to bring data out of Google Music. Yes, it's brand new and early, but there's no talk, unless I missed it, about getting your music downloaded - be it one track or many. You can delete songs from the service. You can edit them and all their metadata, but you can't move them once they're uploaded. This means if you don't fully believe that Google Music will be around forever, you might still want to keep a second copy somewhere.

There is no doubt a considerable back story to the labels' fights with Google, Apple, Amazon and Spotify. I've heard people say there are hundreds of millions of dollars being promised up front and the biggest payer wins. Google said at Google IO that the expectations were prohibitive and they couldn't agree to such arduous terms. If Apple offers a comparable service on the cloud that knows one's iTunes purchasing history, and can eliminate the need to upload and store songs, but get the benefits of cloud, it will have a leg up in usability. I expect in coming months we will hear more from the Google Music team about improving migration and just how we can be sure we can always own our music.