About two months into the beta, existing users were able to invite friends. Early members signed up and waited for the fateful day when an invite would hit their email inbox. The beta launch was in the typical style of Google betas at the time, where an invite system reduced the initial ramp-up load. It was specially designed to work well with iTunes and Windows Media Player and would grab playlists, play counts, and ratings from those apps. From there, your music would work on any client. Checkmate, music pirates.Ī big part of Music Beta was the Music Manager app for Windows, Mac, and ( two months after launch) Linux, which would upload your entire music collection to the cloud, where Google let people store up to 20,000 tracks for free. You can still feel the icy hand of Google's legal department in the original Music Beta invite, which helpfully informs the user at the bottom that 'Music Beta is only for legally acquired music.' You've got to super-seriously pinky promise that none of your music came from LimeWire.
