November 3, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Search engine market leader, Google has decided to enter the online music market, launching a service that aims to help people find and buy music online. Cynics may point out that there are already one or two services around that do this, namely a little known service called iTunes though Google believe that their service will finally be the break through service that offers a viable alternative to illegal downloading and file sharing.
The service, currently named OneBox, is a joint operation with between Google, music site, ‘lala’ and the MySpace owned, ‘iLike’ and will be fully integrated with Google. Users will be able to search via song titles, artists or snippets of lyrics. The aim of the service is to closely reflect the way in which people search for music on Google, a category of search that makes up a huge proportion of their searches, the words ‘music’ and ‘lyrics’ accounting for two of Google’s all time top ten searches.
“At Google, we see millions of music-related queries every day… It is clear to us that for our users music holds a very special and particular place.” – Marissa Mayer Google VP, Search.
Many analysts believe that Google has the clout to make a go of this new venture with mark Mulligan from Forrester even going as far as to say, “Apple can do little about iPod owners downloading from BitTorrent… But Google on the other hand can.”
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