Google’s Music Strategy: Past, Present and Future | Epicenter | Wired.com

See the full article for analysis of how Google could attempt to leapfrog Apple in the music business

Apple has owned the digital music market since it essentially created that market with the launch of the iTunes music store in 2003. Since then, the company’s one-two punch of iTunes and iPod has fended off all comers.

But we’re approaching a major inflection point in the short history of digital music, a time when we stop administering our own music collections on local hard drives, and instead build them online, where they can be accessed on a multitude of connected devices — smartphones, netbooks, tablets, computers, televisions, bookshelf systems and cars — without the tedium of managing each and every file transfer by hand.

And, piece by piece, Google is slowly laying the groundwork to be a player in that space.

Google’s Music Strategy: Past, Present and Future | Epicenter | Wired.com