App of The Day: Google's Music

Google's launched its own music store integrated with Android Market. Best part is, the service still free, though you can now purchase millions of songs from the store to expand your collection of tunes. 90-second track previews are available, and all songs are high quality 320kbps MP3s.

The company is now on an equal plane with Cupertino and Amazon's music offerings, who both offer direct sales coupled with a cloud component that allows for unlimited redownloads. Yet it more closely resembles the latter, as unlike the former[or Apple iTunes version] there isn't a $25 yearly free as all tracks can be streamed for free.

Naturally, a new version of the Google Music app is already available in the Android Market, and a fresh look for Music Manager will follow in the next few hours. Unsurprisingly, Google Music sans beta brings tight integration with Google +. You can now share songs on your friends stream, and not just samples, either -- your buddies can listen to full tracks or albums one time through without ever leaving your profile.

There is no matching function to the new Google Music, so uploads are still a part of the equation, though the service does sync your songs across devices once you've sent them to the cloud.