HP's marketing department may have gotten way ahead

Hewlett-Packard apparently believes there is still room for another player in the cloud music space.

HP is in conversations with the major record labels about launching its own digital music locker service, which would offer music, movies and TV shows, according to Billboard magazine. Speculation that HP had plans for a cloud service has been heating up since Precentral.net reported in April that a confidential PowerPoint presentation about the forthcoming TouchPad mentioned a previously undiscussed HP Music Store and HP Movie Store.

HP's marketing department may have gotten way ahead of the negotiators this time; sources said the discussions are still in the very early stages.

Despite having to follow heavyweights Apple, Amazon, and Google into the cloud, HP has been dabbling in the music business for the better part of the past decade.

• In 2001, HP released a digital-music/computing appliance called the HP Digital Entertainment Center de100c that allowed consumers to download music from the Internet and play it on a home stereo.

• In 2004, HP partnered with Starbucks to launch a new music-centric coffee store in which customers would be able to create their own music compilations from a digital library and burn them to CDs.

• In 2009, HP teamed up with hip-hop impresario Dr. Dre on Beats Audio, a premium line of laptops, headsets, and software designed to reverse the drop-off in sound quality brought on by the onset of digital music.

• In early 2010, HP partnered with Ominfone to distribute the U.K. music provider's MusicStation service on PCs sold in Europe. The service boasted unlimited access to more than 6.5 million DRM-protected music tracks from the four major recording labels.

HP began laying the groundwork for a cloud music service since June 2010, when it acquired Melodeo, a start-up that specializes in music applications and services for mobile devices. At the time, the Seattle-based company was working on an app called Nutsie that would run on several mobile platforms and give users a way to wirelessly transmit music from the iTunes library on their computer to a mobile device.

HP has already hinted at such a service, when marketing materials for their TouchPad tablet included talk of an HP store for music and movies. Like Amazon and Google’s current offerings, HP plans to stream content to users, though they also have goals of streaming content that users don’t already own, something none of the current locker services have been able to offer.

But there’s a reason those services don’t currently offer such a feature, and much of it likely lies with the labels. HP’s talks with the labels are still in the early stages, and they certainly don’t carry the same rapport with said labels as Apple does. It remains to be seen if they can succeed where others have failed.

HP has a long history of testing the waters of the digital music market without making any serious splash. They solicited partners in 2008 with the intention of building a music service. And they partnered with Starbucks a few years before on a program that ultimately proved unprofitable.

While no one doubts HP’s vast resources–which could certainly enable them to put a serious competitor on the market—what is in doubt is whether they can release a compelling product or just another also-ran. The window remains open, as Amazon, Google and Apple’s services all appear to be in their infancy. Were HP to beat them to market with a true all-you-can-eat streaming option for cloud music consumption, it could be a major coup for both the company and the labels.

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