Google Has Reached New Arrangement With Armonia, Gained Access 5.5 Million Songs
Google strikes a new deal with European music publishing entities which now gives it access to 5.5 million tracks in 35 countries, and which includes artists such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
Considered to be one of the largest alliances of music publishers, Armonia will help Google to expand its music offerings in Europe will mean competition for both Amazon and Apple. In fact, the terms of this deal are exactly “in line with industry standards involving Google rivals like Amazon and Apple’s iTunes”.
Catherine Kerr-Vignale, SACEM representative, also considers this deal to be much broader than Apple and Amazon’s country-by-country licensing agreements, and which really boils down to more of its users being able to access more content in more places than before – 35 more countries to be precise.
Until now, Google Play has only had US-only content, and was not able to compete in countries where it lags behind competitors such as Apple and Amazon. With this type of deal, not only can it gain an upper hand on the competition but also offer more international content for its Google Play users.
Another reason why this deal can turn out to advantageous for Google is because it will not only compete with Apple but will prevent Amazon from using Android as their content delivery system for their own marketplace.
What this deal will also do is address the complaints made by international reviewers about the lack of content that the Nexus 7 is unable to offer its consumer outside the United States. This deal between Google and Armonia also offers content from the UK and American parts of the Universal Music Publishing library as well as Sony’s Latin Catalog.