The rumors were true: Google is making a play for the music search space.
The search-engine giant unveiled the new service yesterday, causing the internet - and especially Twitter - to light up with rave reviews from some, and constructive critiques and head scratching from others.
Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures told his 35,000 followers that it's "terrific" Google rolled out the service, though he really dislikes the audio preview experience.
"A 30-second sample of a song is an awful experience in my opinion," Wilson wrote.
In another sample reaction, Musician FluidArt tweeted that he wondered "what's going to come from Google Music."
Most of the Tweets, however, passed along reviews published shortly after Google rolled out the application.
Lyrics Search Needs a Tweak
Though The Consumerist liked how the service is able to identify songs based on snippets of lyrics, thanks to a partnership with Gracenote, MTV talked about that service too - but with less praise. "It's a little wonky. Searching for choruses generally works, but poking around for deeper lyrics is more troublesome," it said.
Ian Paul at PC World had similar complaints. "In my tests, Google easily delivered music samples when searching for album names, artists, and song titles, he said. However, when he searched using song lyrics, Google often came up short.
Paul reported that searching for the lyrics "I walk alone," for example, brought up a song called "I Walk Alone," from a WWE Raw wrestling album produced in 2007. It did not, however, bring up a song that famously repeats those words over and over again– "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" from Green Day's 2004 album American Idiot."
Overall though, MTV said, a cursory test drive yielded pretty excellent results. "A search for Beyonce led to a streaming version of "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" in seconds, and even digging up Mystikal's turn-of-the-century hit "Shake Ya Ass" was no trouble at all."
6% Music Related
Once these kinks are worked out, the service is bound to attract a lot of traffic, based on statistics released by Hitwise the same morning.
Out of the top 1,000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6% were music-related, including bands, music services and content. Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the music category and of those visits, 95% of the downstream traffic to music sites were returning visitors, Hitwise said.
Continued success of the service remains to be seen, but if Google can work out the kinks with its search and the service takes off, it will undoubtedly mean more ad sales for Google.
