Music Notes: Hot Shows on Sale; Les Paul Google Doodle; & the Deal Sisters Turn 50

Happy 50th birthday to those rock & roll twins, Kim & Kelley Deal!

Here's a mish-mash of musical updates for June 10th...

* The most timely news involves some in-demand gigs that went on sale today:

• Black Angels and The Sadies at Maxwell's, July 15
  
• Detroit Cobras at Maxwell's, August 11
  (Also at Maxwell's: a third show with The Feelies has been added on July 3)
  
• Fleet Foxes and The Walkmen at Williamsburg Waterfront, Sept. 24

* Many work hours were no doubt lost on Thursday to employees playing around with the very cool Les Paul "Google doodle" featuring playable guitar strings (Les Paul, who died in 2009, would have turned 96 on Thursday). The guitar-string doodle was so popular that Google kept it as its logo on Friday, and now it has gone one step further: it has created a permanent home for the Les Paul guitar doodle, says the L.A. Times. You can find it, and play it, at www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html

* And speaking of birthdays, June 10th marked The Big Five-0 for those rocking twin sisters, Kim and Kelley Deal. The Dayton, Ohio natives have been on the scene a long time, in bands from The Pixies and The Amps (Kim) to The Breeders (Kim and Kelley). (See the video for the Breeders' classic song, "Cannonball," above, from their Last Splash album.) Happy birthday and many more to the Deal sisters.

Music Notes: Google Music Beta Announced; Groupon & Live Nation to Offer Discount Concert Tickets

Google Music is now in beta, and you can apply to be part of it.

The music landscape continues to shift and change, the last couple of days have seen several big companies jockeying for position.

* Google announced its music streaming service today at the Google I/O conference (a meeting of Google software developers). The service, currently called Google Music beta, is in limited use now, but when it goes live it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against Amazon's cloud player and cloud drive, which the online store launched last month. Ironically Apple, which is the 800-pound gorilla in selling music online, has yet to stake its claim in the streaming/music cloud turf.

The Google music service is similar in some ways to Amazon's cloud player. It will let users stream music and rent movies over their Android devices. According to the L.A. Times, users will be able to upload up to 20,000 songs to their computers and mobile devices. Unlike Amazon, however, users will not be able to buy music from Google's service. Amazon allows customers to buy music and other digital content and immediately store it on their cloud account. Users of Google Music beta will have to manually upload the music they already own to the service.

An interesting note is that Google, like Amazon, does not have licensing deals with the music labels for streaming the content, and decided to proceed without it. This could raise certainly some legal issues. You can sign up for the Google Music beta at music.google.com/about.

The Times article says that at first the Google music service will be available by invitation and only in the U.S., and will be free in beta. It's not clear what charges there may be when the service comes out of beta.

* Groupon and Live Nation are teaming up for discount concert tickets. The group-buying concept of Groupon and LivingSocial has been a huge hit for all kinds of products and services, and now it's coming to concert tickets. The service, called GrouponLive, was rolled out on Monday, and will officially launch in the summer, according to an article in the L.A. Times — just in time for the outdoor concert season. "GrouponLive will sell tickets to Live Nation concerts, as well as for companies that sell tickets for concerts, sports, plays and other events through the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster," the article says.

You can sign up for GrouponLive at www.groupon.com/live.

The live music industry has been clobbered the last few years. While some big-name acts have done well, many others have had to pare back or cancel their tours. Live Nation is no doubt hoping to use discounts to boost sales that have slowed in part due to what's perceived as ticket prices that are too high in a soft economy. There was widespread discounting at outdoor venue shows last summer, with places such as New Jersey's PNC Arts Center offering $40 lawn tickets for $10 for some shows.

Amazon Launches its Cloud Media Player, Beating Apple and Google

Amazon.com last week launched its cloud media player and storage locker, beating Apple and Google to the punch. Once you upload music to your Cloud Drive or "locker" (or buy it from Amazon), you can play it on your computer or other device. The Amazon Cloud Player works on all Web browsers, the company says, and can also be used on Android mobile phones or tablets by downloading an application.

The Web version of the cloud player gives you get 5GB of storage space free, and if you buy one MP3 album from the company, you immediately get upgraded to 20GB (which you'd otherwise have to pay for).

Note: Amazon calls the 20GB upgrade with an album purchase a one-year "trial;" in other words, if you load up your "locker" with more than 5GB of media, a year from now you'll have to pay to keep all that stuff there, or pay for an upgrade. Unless of course Amazon decides to make 20GB the normal limit for free storage. Or maybe they'll extend your "trial" if you keep buying MP3 albums from them; it's not clear.

Apple has been said to be working on a cloud music service based on its existing MobileMe platform, which now charges $99 for 20GB of storage, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. As the article points out, Amazon could have a good competitive advantage by being first: once users start uploading their music or movies to a cloud-based system, they'll probably tend to stick with that one.

I signed up for the Amazon Cloud Player the day it went live, though I can't really say I've given it a test run. I haven't tried uploading any music from my computer, though I have bought some singles and one MP3 album from Amazon since then, which I have downloaded to my computer as before; they are automatically stored in my "cloud" as well. It's pretty easy to use and intuitive, as you'd expect from Amazon.

One potential dark cloud (sorry!) for Amazon's new service: it may run afoul of record companies since it hasn't secured additional licenses for the streaming, says an article in Wired. "If the record labels don’t come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too," the website says.

Nexus One Google Phone Steals Spotlight from Apple Tablet (Reviews)

Left: The Google Nexus One phone. Photo: AyoubZubairi.

Until a few days ago the rumored Apple tablet computer was the big buzz in the tech gadget space, but yesterday's launch of of the Nexus One Google phone has been grabbing all the attention since then. Here's a recap of some of the opinions and reviews of the Google phone (announced just in time for the CES 2010 expo) so you can decide whether it's a good choice for you.

One place to start is Google's own page for the Nexus One, www.google.com/phone. Of course it's biased, but the 3D tour gives you an overview of the phone's features and what Google thinks are its most important assets.

Engadget offers its Nexus One review here, examining everything from the hardware to the internals, design, display, camera, telephone features, software, battery life, and more. Their verdict in a sentence: "It's a good Android phone, but not the last word -- in fact, if we had to choose between this phone or the Droid right now, we would lean towards the latter."

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and All Things D sums up his review in its headline - "Google's Nexus One is Bold New Face in Super-Smartphones." He calls it "the best Android phone so far, in my view, and the first I could consider carrying as my everyday hand-held computer," but adds that "The iPhone still retains some strong advantages."

David Pogue, the personal technology columnist of the New York Times, offers a review of the Nexus One here, and also discusses it in a video. He finds that the Nexus One "isn’t quite as earthshaking as Google seems to think it is" and "is missing some important features that iPhone fans take for granted."

Robert Scoble links to plenty of Nexus One info from his Twitter page, www.twitter.com/Scobleizer, and also offers this review-in-a-tweet: "My 140 Character Google Nexus Review? Way better than Droid. Close enough to iPhone that it will take major market share. Very impressed." He also has an audio segment that answers questions about the Nexus One that he's been getting on Twitter. (By the way, Scoble is now at CES and will be tweeting updates throughout the show.)

There's plenty more information out there are the Google Nexus One, but this will give you a start.

Google Introduces New Chrome PC Operating System

When Google introduced its Chrome Web browser just nine months ago, some experts wondered if it was the first step in the company coming out with its own PC operating system. Now, Google has done just that: on the night of July 7th the company issued a press release introducing its Google Chrome operating system.

The release calls the Chrome OS an extension of the Chrome Web browser. "It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be," the company said. Google described the new product as an "open source, lightweight operating system" that would initially be targeted to run in netbooks, the inexpensive, often bare-bones laptops that have taken the PC market by storm in the last year or so.

Google stressed that the Chrome OS is separate from Android, the mobile phone platform that runs on the G1 smartphone. Chrome is said to be based on the principle of "the Web is the platform." So it should eventually be able to run on PCs, Macs, etc. Google says the Chrome OS is built on top of Linux (the OS that is often used on many of today's netbooks, either as a primary OS or as an alternative to Windows).

And it said that it was rethinking the security underpinnings of the operating system, so that "users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates."

The Chrome OS will be available to consumers in the second half of 2010, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Coming just nine months after the introduction of the Chrome broswer, the Chrome OS is an ambitious new offering from Google that adds a new wrinkle to the operating system choices that computer users have. It will be interesting to see if, since it supposedly uses the Web as a platform, it can be made to run on Mac and other platforms easily.

The odd thing is, why did Google choose to issue its press release at 9:30 p.m. West Coast time (12:30 a.m. in the East)?

Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo

Microsoft has coveted Yahoo for a long time in its quest to better compete with Google, and now Mr. Softy has formally made a bid for Yahoo.

Microsoft's bid, which it made on Friday, is an unsolicited offer to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. Mr. Softy is offering $31 a share for Yahoo, which is 62% above Yahoo's closing stock price on Thursday afternoon. Yahoo said it would consider the bid.

From a music fan's point of view, I'm wondering what the purchase, if it goes through, would mean for services like Yahoo Music. Would Microsoft try to put its clunky DRM protections or other restrictions on Yahoo music, in order to try to get users to pay for unrestricted content to try to make money to earn back some of the millions it would pay for Yahoo? Microsoft doesn't have a good track record on music and copyright-related matters, so I'm wary. And as someone who uses a number of Yahoo services, I'm not sure I want Microsoft in control of my personal info, especially in light of Mr. Softy's many problems with Windows security.

Coming to YouTube: Doctor Who and Friends

Although YouTube couldn't reach an agreement with Viacom on content, it just signed a deal with a major broadcaster from overseas. YouTube and the BBC announced today that they had inked a deal to put the British broadcaster's programming on the popular video sharing site.

The content will include popular shows such as Doctor Who, Spooks, and The Catherine Tate Show. It's not clear whether the content will involve excerpts of all shows or the complete shows. It sounds like there will be at least one news channel and one entertainment channel, though one report I read indicated there would be two entertainment channels.

It's said that advertising will be included in one of the channels, which has caused some controversy in Britain. The BBC is funded by license fees that TV owners in Britain purchase, and the network contains no advertising. The Beeb's international programming can contain advertising, and there's been much rancor over whether properties such as the BBC News Web site should contain ads.

As an American, I don't see any problem with them including ads on content shown outside Britain, since they don't get any licensing money from non-British users (though they do receive money for the rights to show programming on networks such as PBS). I'm looking forward to being able to see more BBC programming, with or without ads.