Google is said to be looking to introduce its own music store, following the release of its cloud service, Music Beta, earlier this year.
Music Beta allows users to back up their music on remote servers, allowing songs to be streamed to devices. It is widely expected that the search giant's MP3 store will be linked to the Music Beta service.
According to reports, Google's previous efforts to enter the music space were hampered when negotiations of licensing agreements with record companies broke down last year.
A New York Times report says talks with record labels have now been resumed, and Google is looking to release the service in a matter of weeks. Google is yet to make any official statements on the matter.
The digital music space has been dominated by Apple's iTunes Music Store since its debut in 2003. The service sells songs and albums on a download basis.
Google will have to compete with Apple and Amazon for the music download market. Music services are also facing competition from streaming services and the cloud.
Facebook's recent updates have also seen the addition of social music services such as Spotify embedded in the social network.
Spotify, a European music streaming service, expanded to the US in July and reportedly has more than 250 000 paying users in that market and is growing rapidly. Globally, the service is said to have over two million paid subscribers.
Since joining forces with Facebook, the service has also reportedly added three million global users.
Google is said to be looking to release its own service before Apple unveils its new cloud music service, iTunes Match. iTunes Match is part of iCloud, and is a paid service in which Apple scans a user's music library and then matches that library to songs on its own servers, uploading songs one doesn't have.
While Apple's service was granted the necessary licences, Google is still reportedly struggling to convince record labels that its new music service will not fuel piracy.
If Google is successful in starting its own music service, it could potentially leverage its other services such as Google+ in order to create its own native social music service.
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