Comments for Google To Launch Music Search Service Next Week

Google To Launch Music Search Service Next Week

2009-10-23T06:51:49Z

You've probably seen Google Finance, where each company has its own page made up of content scraped from all over the web. Google is about to launch a similar service for musicians, says the Hollywood Reporter: "The music pages will package images of musicians and bands, album artwork, links to news, lyrics and song previews, along with a way to buy songs."

]]> Google won't sell the songs directly; they'll most likely be sold by Lala or iLike, according to the article, and Google will only make money off of ads that appear on the pages. Lala is actually pretty cheap: we compared prices on the latest Arctic Monkeys album on Lala and Amazon, and Lala beat Amazon by over $2 dollars for the same 256kb VBR files.

By comparison, the artist pages on Yahoo and over at Last.fm link directly to iTunes and Amazon for sales. (Last.fm also links to something called "7digital.") They make money off of referrals, as far as we can tell.

We don't care what business model the three sites use; we just want the best value for our music budget. Of course, there's no reason you can't buy your music from Lala today, but we're still curious to see what sort of service Google will deliver next week and whether they'll offer any added value.

"Google to unveil music search" [Hollywood Reporter]
(Photo: carolyn.will)

Comment from spenc938 on 2009-10-24

2009-10-24T07:35:38Z

@Do you know of any other programs with similar functionality? I don't use iTunes, but have always wanted something like this.

Comment from Laura Northrup on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T21:22:37Z

@dragonfire81: Yeah, actually, this exists as an iPhone app, but I don't have an iPhone so I don't care.

Comment from dragonfire81 on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T19:39:30Z

@Laura Northrup: And I'd probably guess there's an "App for that too". :P

Comment from uncle moe on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T19:12:13Z

very anxious to see how the album art comes into play, i'm working thru a pretty big mess of tags trying to get everything just right and in trying to get 500x500 or better images for some bands is next to impossible

Comment from Laura Northrup on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T12:47:00Z

@goodstuffmaynard: There's an iTunes plugin that does that. [www.iconcertcal.com]

Comment from H3ion on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T09:07:30Z

Rhapsody seems to work fairly well and has a wide selection. I believe it's owned by RealPlayer.

AllMusic (www.allmusic.com) is worth a look.

Comment from goodstuffmaynard on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T08:34:34Z

You know what I've always wanted? Some kind of service where you can say what bands you're interested in, and then it e-mails you whenever one of the bands either releases a new album, or is touring in your city.

Perhaps this new Google service will provide that...

Comment from canuck on 2009-10-23

2009-10-23T07:20:35Z

interested in seeing how this will work. my music is on garageband (and therefore on iLike by default), but it is free for downloading and sharing.

i wonder if artists will have the option to create a profile in google that can link to a non-commercial iLike site? or do the songs have to be available for sale?