Did Google Just Quietly Launch A Web-Based iTunes Competitor? Yep.

Downloading a lot of music over the cellular data network is a bit scary to me. Is it really wise? That's a lot of bandwidth being devoted to a task that can be accomplished faster and more efficiently by just plugging in a USB cable. Phones are personal devices -- it's not like they're too far out of reach at any given time. It would probably be more responsible for this feature to only work over wifi at least until the US data networks catch-up with current demand. I don't want to suffer with slow speeds because someone has their SmartPhone 6 inches from their computer doing OTA downloads of 80MB albums instead of plugging in a cable. I suspect some carriers will disable this feature on their devices. The OTA/web app downloading on the other hand makes perfect sense. Fairly small apps -- stuff you'd be downloading on your phone anyway.

Do music stores even matter anymore? Selling DRM-free MP3 downloads is a commodity business if I've ever seen one. The only trick is getting labels to sign on. Besides, syncing is an essential part of buying MP3 music: you don't want your music library only stored on your easily-lost cellphone, do you?<p>Anyone know if Google's music store lets you re-download songs? If not, I imagine there's going to be more than a few people who have to re-buy a bunch of albums because they lost their never-synced phone.

Will this be an adequate replacement for Lala? It sounds like it might be.

Techcrunch is using the term "launch" loosely here.

Good try, but still not good enough. My media startup will destroy them both.