It won't be launched quite the way it was intended, but today Google will unveil Music Beta, a cloud-based music player that aims to take on Amazon's Cloud Drive and a forthcoming product from Apple. The service, which allows users to store purchased music on a online locker (rather than clog up a hard drive with mp3s), will be announced today at a developers' conference in San Francisco.

According a rundown from Billboard's Antony Bruno, Music Beta doesn't come with the blessing of major record labels, who balked at the service just like they did with Amazon's Cloud Drive. Google had been planning features like a "scan-and-match" locker that uploaded users' music and matched songs "to a centralized server, paying rightsholders for each stream," wrote Bruno. As of now, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Google's service should be seen as a enormous "remote hard drive," since users won't be able to purchase songs from the tech company initially.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.