One of the distinctive features of Google’s Music service is the users’ ability to scan and match their music library, thus making it accessible for free from anywhere.

The scan and match option spares users from having to wait for gigabytes of songs to upload, a process that can take days, depending on the size of the music collection. Google’s service simply scans each song and look for a match in the cloud, thus dramatically cutting the time it takes to make the music available. Apple and Amazon also offer such a service, but they charge $25 per year for the convenience, while Google makes 20,000 songs accessible without any costs.

More than a year from its US debut, Google Music was launched in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain at the beginning of the week. But, even though the scan and match service was mentioned in the feature log, it didn’t appear to be functioning.

That has changed since then; Ben Kersey from The Verge reports that the scan and match service now works, although there are still some kinks to be ironed out. For example, while the actual process of matching tunes works, users have no way to know that, unless they look at the traffic generated by Google’s Music Manager application.

The debut of Google Music in Europe is an important step forward in Google’s quest to offer a complete media ecosystem to as many users as possible. Let’s hope that the folks in Mountain View will expand the reach of their services to more countries soon.

To give Google Music a try head over here. Let us know your experience with it.