If music makes the world go round then finally Google have jumped on the bandwagon.
Google have just announced that they have launched a new and free music service in China that will enable Chinese users to download licensed music tracks completely free of charge and will share advertising revenue with some of the major music labels.
Users of the Google service will be able to search for music they like by musical beat, by instrument as well as by artist and song title.
To do it, Google has partnered with Chinese music website, Top100.cn a music site co-founded by basket ball star Yao Ming.
Up till now Google haven’t ventured into this market at all so were really at risk of losing out to other search engines such as Baidu.com which has secured more than half (60%) of the market share in global web searches in China.
Google might be a world leader in the search engine stakes but in China they have less than half the share that Baidu has.
According to Lee Kai-Fu the president of Google in China, Google were missing out by not offering music. “We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads,” Lee told reporters. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music.”
And now they do. To start with Google’s service will offer around 350,000 songs from both Chinese and foreign artists that are signed with the likes of Sony, EMI, Warner Music and Universal Music labels but the number of tracks available for download is expected to rise to over a million in the near future.
“This is the first serious attempt to start (monetizing) the online market in China. I can’t overestimate how important this is,” said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
According to the IFPI, 99% of all music distributed in China is pirated and despite China’s large potential market, China’s legitimate music sales account for less than 1 percent of music sales globally.
Some hope that by offering better quality music, completely free of charge, it will lure people away from these illegal downloads. I suppose it might work.
“This legal music service will help users avoid dead links, slow downloads, inaccurate search results, and poor quality or incomplete songs,” Google said in a statement.
Go Google.
If you want to find out all the latest news on tech why not subscribe to our RSS feed?
Leave a Reply