Google China Launches a Free Music Service. March 30 2009: A Day To Remember.

Posted on 04. Apr, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Music Industry Trends

It’s been official for 24 hours now: Google has launched an ad-supported free music search in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4.

The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry. Screenshots for non-Chinese readers have been made available by Music 2.0. It looks pretty slick, with lyrics, a flash player, upsell of ringback tones. Tracks are DRM free and high-quality (192kbps).

The news was not unexpected. It is a tactical move for Google to win market share against its long-time competitor Baidu, which has about 62 percent of the Chinese search engine market and has grown partly by offering music search services and linking to sites that offer free downloads of music. By comparison, Google has only about 28 percent of the search engine market in China. Pretty lame for a Google!

So a new alliance Google-Record Labels is born with the immediate goal to try to monetize the world largest illegal music market, China. Revenues will/should come through advertising, which will be shared between Google and the Labels. China has been a tough nut to crack for the music industry in “traditional” ways: Chinese consumers have skipped the CD generation and happily jumped into the Napster-p2p file-sharing one.

But whatever the immediate goals, it is evident that this is/will soon be a Paradigm Shift for both the industry and consumers and it is going to be a global one.

In the words of MediaFuturist Gerd Leonhard: if this works in China, why not do this everywhere else? If this works for Google, why not for telecoms, ISPs and mobile operators? If this works for music, why not – sooner or later – for music, TV, video, books and newspapers?