Google appears to be prepping for a push into the digital music business, despite previous denials by the company. According to an article in the Financial Times, the search giant is readying plans to launch a music search service with two online music platforms - News Corp's MySpace, and Lala.
The new service will be part of Google's One Box initiative – also an unconfirmed effort that is widely believed to be under way. The new search feature will enable people to link to, and then stream clips of songs from the big-four music labels' catalogs of songs and artists directly from Google's search page, the British paper reports.
The strategy could likely position Google's search page as a one-stop shop for users to discover, preview and buy music. iLike and Lala have relationships with Amazon and Apple's iTunes, which is how the purchases will be made.
Music Only First Step
According to sources familiar with One Box, it is a concept - a streamlined approach to searching specific subjects – that Google hopes to replicate in other verticals such as financial services and weather services.
For their part, the record labels will generate revenue from the music streams or purchases, while Google, of course, will benefit from the search advertising positioned around this category, according to a source quoted in the New York Post .
A Larger Focus
Music also appears to be becoming a larger focus for social networking sites. Facebook just announced a service it is offering through Lala whereby it will sell music and allow Facebook users to send music to their friends to store on their profiles, via credits. Songs can be downloaded for $1; the credits will cost 10 cents.
Meanwhile MySpace - the de-facto social music destination - is also strengthening its strong bona fides in this area through the recent launch of a video service that uses content from the four big labels. Users that wish to purchase a video will connect to Amazon and iTunes.
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta promoted the changes at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. The company now features a single Web page stocked with music videos from all major music labels. "MySpace also released new tools for artists that are aimed at helping them evaluate MySpace user behavior to help them sell songs and other products," the Wall Street Journal reported.
MySpace's Music Value Add
MySpace launched its streaming music and video service, MySpace Music, in late 2008. By July 2009, traffic had increased 1017%.Then, earlier this summer MySpace acquired the iLike music sharing service.
Some three months later, the value of the acquisition has taken shape, writes Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb.
"Through iLike, music video widgets, now popular installations on other social networks like Facebook and Orkut, the videos - and, most importantly, their ads - can be streamed on other sites while the revenue generated returns to MySpace," Perez noted. "Even though many of the users watching these videos now may be lost forever to MySpace, they're helping the company regain its footing through their streams."
