June 23rd, 2010 | Bill McIntosh, Founder

According to the Wall Street journal, Google is getting ready to offer its own music service.  The search giant will provide two services, one offering music downloads while the other will provide subscription-based streaming. Such a move will place Google as a direct competitor of Apple’s Itunes and Amazon’s MP3 service.

While some might complain that Google is once again increasing its influence, this is good news for a struggling music industry which was complaining about Itunes’ monopoly-like position. This should also make fans of the now defunct music site Lala happy as Apple shut down the popular service a month ago. The buzz being that Apple closed Lala to launch a similar platform on itunes.com, music fans should soon be able to have access to various music sources, which should result in the price per song and album going down.

But there is more at stakes as this music war reaches far beyond the world wide web since it will also be a way to increase the market share of Google’s android platform vs Apple’s Iphones:  the new Google music services will of course work in sync with Google’s android phones, thus attacking aggressively the Iphone market.