Google Music's Surprise: It's Free

Years late to the music party, Google makes up for it by offering its Music Service for free -- mostly.

Late to the music party, Google makes up for it by offering its Music Service for free -- mostly. At an event Wednesday afternoon, Google announced that it would not charge for its cloud storage service. For zero dollars Google will hold and stream up to 20,000 songs in the cloud, which is cheap compared to Apple's $24.99 annual price for its similar service iTunes Match (though Apple does let you store 5,000 more tracks). As expected, Google also announced a music store to go along with this cloud service, that will offer up millions of songs from Sony, EMI, Universal and Indie labels -- but no Warner, as Gizmodo's Sam Biddle notes. This is the not free part: Just like iTunes, Google will sell tracks for $.99 - $1.29. And all of the talk of free doesn't mean anything to iPhone users -- the service is exclusively for Android users.