Google Inc. is preparing as early as Tuesday to unveil a new online music service similar to a service recently launched by Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a move that escalates the battle to create the next generation of Internet businesses for storing and listening to music.

Google, like Amazon, hasn’t secured licenses from the four major recorded-music companies, according to these people, and is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive. Users of the service are expected to be able to listen to songs they have uploaded to the service in a so-called streaming mode but won’t be able to download the files themselves.

It’s funny how Google follows every amazon stop … Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) -> Google App Engine … Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) -> Google Storage for Developers … Amazon Cloud Drive / Player -> Google Cloud Drive / Player …

With Google’s amazing track record (of zero) of building friendly services and applications, I don’t expect their music locker to really take off … especially again if it’s based on Google Storage for Developers, which is not being used by any developer.

Google, do you want to really get anywhere with this? Buy Orb , scale it, embed it seamlessly into your cloud, and offer up the first cloud based full media center.