Introducing Google Play, where you buy things for play and also things not for play
Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play.
Google creating a media hub to compete with iTunes is smart. Google too often fires out numerous projects and they rarely mesh and gel. To be competitive when it comes to stuff you can shove on to a device, centralising everything makes a lot of sense. But Google Play? It’s an odd piece of branding. Apple’s ‘App Store’ and ‘iTunes Store’ are pretty dry but they’re also balanced brands used as a container for disparate things. With Google, however, you get:
Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks
You ‘play’ songs—fair enough. And music is fundamentally a leisure activity. There’s also the well-known play icon, so the brand works well here.
Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games
Fair enough for games, but for apps? I’m not thinking ‘play’ when I use iA Writer, Brushes or many of the other productivity apps on my iPad. It seems strange to use ‘play’ as a descriptive word for housing Android’s apps.
Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks
Do you ‘play’ a book? Reading is typically split between education and leisure, and ‘play’ is often very much the wrong word for the former.
Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles
This works similarly to songs, in the sense that you ‘play’ movies, although it’s easy enough to argue that this isn’t necessarily the best branding for movies that are research- and education-oriented.
I realise I’m overthinking this and many people simply won’t care nor think much about Google’s brand for its centralised resource for downloading apps and media; but to me the brand smacks of something that would be used for entertainment purposes only, and it isn’t suitable for apps that aren’t games and books/movies that aren’t primarily intended for fun.
EDIT: Sam Radford on Twitter makes an excellent point:
Though iTunes makes no sense for buying books, apps, movies, games, magazine, etc.
Of course, iTunes itself has mushroomed from an MP3 player into a media hub, but he’s right that the branding no longer makes sense—and it hasn’t for a while. Perhaps, then, it’s more about what we’re used to, in which case Google’s challenge will be in ‘training’ people to realise that Google Play encompasses everything—not just leisure apps and media. (Mind you, Google’s other challenge, judging by its past, will be in sticking with something for the long-term, too, and not axing/reworking its offering on a whim.)
The iTunes Store doesn’t just contain music (i.e. ‘tunes’) either. (Nor does iTunes itself only play music). So, there! :p
(Yeah, I know, it’s a legacy brand that outgrew its name. Eh.)
If I may be serious, it’s possible Google intends a wider meaning than literally ‘play’. It could be that they will focus their marketing on a life in motion, and Google Play being the hub that brings it all together.
Of course, I’m probably overthinking it as well (and/or have watched too many adverts in my time that have used that angle). Perhaps the idea was to have a separate music service, and then everything else grew out of that.
(I do agree, though – ‘Play’ sounds like a lifestyle brand, not a digital marketplace of stuff.)
Brand names largely don’t matter, as long as they’re reasonably simple. Wii, PlayStation, Mac, iPod, Google, GameBoy, ThinkPad, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Amazon, … All pretty dumb names, but they’re simple enough, and once you get used to them, their “brand meanings” mostly displace any other images these words might have created in your head.