Google Music Search – Made in China

Google's Chinese Music Box
Summary of the Article

For less than six months now, Google has had a service that allows users to download an unlimited amount of music from almost every major label. Does that sound too good to be true? Well for five percent of the world it’s not. The service, called Google Music Search, is available to everyone living in China and limited to only those individuals. The rest of us still have to settle for our P2P and torrent applications and the viruses potentially hiding in every file we download.

But why is it that the Chinese are the only lucky ones?

That is because of the high piracy rate of music online; so much so that 99.9% of all China’s music services are illegal downloads. Because of this, the music business in China has been hurting and is looking for new ways to be successful. If this project does work, then Google will look into launching the same service in other country markets where piracy is also widespread, such as Russia and India.

Google Music Search already has a strong competitor in the market that has been long established and possesses a large market share. The site is Baidu.com and it looks to be the Chinese equivalent of Google in America; with web, video, and image searching along with other similar features and of course the mp3 search and download feature. However, the creators of GMS are not worried. Their service provides a higher quality product with faster downloading rates, zero advertisements in the music files, and no more downloading the wrong song. They are able to do this by working with the labels and offering a legal service.

Response

It is hard for me to critique something without being able to actually test it before hand; but, the description of Google Music Search alone has me excited at the possibility of it coming to America in the distant future. What is not to love about a service that would allow you to download all of your favorite songs for free and do it lawfully? Also, would it be wrong of me to secretly hope piracy becomes more prevalent in the United States so that we turn into a more appealing market for GMS?

Even if Google Music Search fails to turn a profit and does not make it out of China, I think it will definitely spark more interest in such a service. In my opinion, it is inevitable that all music will one day be available for download online and that it would be smart for the record labels to get a head start on future competition and team up with Google now for America’s edition of Google Music Search.
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Greenberg, Andy. "Google's Chinese Music Box." Forbes 27 Aug 2009 Web. http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/music-search-internet-intelligent-technology-google.html