Google strikes licensing deal with European music publishers, gains access to 5.5 M tracks in 35 countries

Google has reached a new agreement with the European music publishing entities, which will give it access to the 5.5 million songs covering 35 countries, including artists like Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The agreement was made with the Armonia, one of the biggest alliances of music publishers in the world, which includes French, Italian and Spanish licensing groups. This should help Google expand the availability of its music offerings in Europe, apparently to compete with the media about the market on Amazon and Apple.

The associated press reported that the terms of the deal were "in accordance with industry standards, including Google rivals like Amazon and Apple iTunes," according to the SACEM representative Catherine Kerr-Vignale. Kerr-Vignale also noted that when Amazon and Apple have a country-by-country licensing agreements in place for European distribution deal is Google's broader reach for 35 countries. The deal also includes American and Uk sections of Universal Music Publishing library and the Latin catalogue of Sony.

The Google deal means that more of its customers in more locations will be able to have access to a wider range of content, a key ingredient for Google, if it wants to continue to build traction in markets where its media ecosystem lags behind those of its competitors and Apple in particular. Game Google still has a fair amount of United States only content that requires workarounds as described in this recent article. But Google has been vocal about trying to add more content for international clients, Google game and licensing deals like this are about to happen.

This deal and those like him are potentially the most important part about Google, goes ahead, compete with Apple abroad and making sure that upstarts such as Amazon doesn't use Android as mainly content delivery system for their own competitive market. It should help to deal with a spate of complaints, which emerged from the international reviewers around the time of the Nexus 7 release, while Google can continue pulling in agreements like this in various sections Google game media.