It’s getting harder to tell who’s following who these days.

On the MP3 front, at least, Google’s (News - Alert) following Apple and Amazon as The New York Times is reporting that five months after it “introduced a cloud music service with limited capabilities, Google is in negotiations with the major record labels to expand that service and also open an MP3 store.”

Note to everybody “occupying” Wall Street and everywhere else: Slam capitalism and corporations all you want, but this is exactly how it’s supposed to work: Companies compete to give you what you want at the best price possible. If you’re not into that, feel free to relocate to North Korea. You can avoid corporations and banks there.

“Numerous music executives” the Times spoke with said the service would “most likely be connected to Google’s existing cloud service, Music Beta, which lets people back up their songs on remote servers and stream them to mobile phones and other devices.” Predictably Google had no official comment.

The Times speculated, probably correctly, that Google wants to steal a march on Apple (News - Alert), whose cloud music program iTunes Match should be working the way it’s intended to by Halloween. Will it be a full-service store? The Times doesn’t think they have all the necessary deals with music labels and the other suits in place yet. It seems they don’t like the fact that Google probably isn’t doing everything it could to curb piracy.

“We want to make sure the locker doesn’t become a bastion of piracy,” one senior label executive said, alluding to the “smart locker service,” described by the Times as “a Web storage system that lets people link their digital music collections to a vast central database.” Obviously one can understand the piracy concerns the industry would have with such a setup.

Apple, of course, plays nice with the labels as far as getting i’s dotted and t’s crossed, so they got licenses for iTunes Match, which users can use to “instantly link a user’s songs to Apple’s master collection.” Google -- and Amazon, with their Cloud Drive -- have unlicensed services, where “users must upload each song individually, a process that can take hours or even days” depending on the size of your collection, the Times noted.

Score one for Apple there.