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Google prepping new music service
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 22 October 2009
So, Google will reportedly next week launch a new music service which aims to make it easier to discover and buy music via the uber search engine.
Powered by the now MySpace-owned iLike and Warner Music-backed Lala.com, insiders say the new service will let people, who search for an artist, stream tracks by said act directly through the search engine, and then click a buy button which will take them directly to a relevant sell-through page. Or something like that. It sounds a bit like Seeqpod and Grooveshark, but shouldn’t suffer any of the licensing issues that have dogged those smaller search services given all four majors are on board.
So far most of what we know about the new Google service comes from two unnamed insiders (I’m calling them Bertram and Dirk) who have spoken to tech site TechCrunch. A more formal announcement is expected next Wednesday, meanwhile the official line from Google seems to be that most of what has been mooted so far is just “speculation”.
Google, of course, have long been tipped as a contender in the digital music space, and as one of the few brands capable of taking on iTunes’ dominance of the digital music market. Not least because they’ve been secretly profiling the music tastes of Gmail users for years. That said, the IT firm has long said it isn’t interested in going head to head with Apple et al in the download market. Certainly the new service being discussed seemingly sees the web giant forming partnerships with a number of existing players in the market rather than going into direct competition with any of the big boys.
Nevertheless some were predicting yesterday that Google’s new service could have a big impact on the digital music sector. Interestingly at least seven predictors dropped their usual line of “it’s going to be the iTunes killer” and adopted “it’s going to be the Spotify killer”, which is an incredible achievement for Spotify, particularly as the popular European streaming service hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, killed off iTunes. I’m not sure they’ve even inflicted a flesh wound as yet.
