Sometime in the next six months, it may become possible for individuals to buy music straight from Google.  People familiar with the matter believe the company will launch a music store with ties to its main search engine, and later, a cloud-based subscription service is supposed to debut.

Of course, we’ve heard similar rumors many times before, and at this point, any sort of official confirmation is still lacking.  It’s possible Google itself doesn’t even know how everything will work out, given the licensing deals and user interface adjustments that any move into this market would require.  Nonetheless, the details of the latest report are interesting to consider.

Scott Morrison explained last night, "The first phase of Google’s music service is expected to be a Web store where users can buy and download tracks, music industry insiders said.  It will be tied directly to Google’s search engine, so that people using Google.com to look for a particular group or song will be served a link to the company’s music store . . .

As for the rest of Google’s music-related plans, Morrison wrote about "a more ambitious cloud-based subscription service compatible with mobile phones built with Google’s Android software.  A cloud-based service would enable subscribers to stream music directly from the Internet to their mobile phones, so that users wouldn’t need to store music files on their devices."

These ideas seem plausible, given that they’d take advantage of Google’s dominance in the search market and complement its interest in cloud computing.

The ideas seem likely to achieve some level of success, too, if Google decides to follow through and doesn’t make its pricing less than competitive.