Grown Up Thinking

With a single evolutionary change to its search engine, Google has facilitated a major shift in user experience for finding, exploring, and purchasing music online.

The search giant has tapped leading social music platforms Pandora, iMeem, Lala, Rhapsody, and the recent MySpace acquisition, iLike, to provide intelligent music-related search results and legal downloads through the Google Music Search.

Search Google for an artist, album, song, or string of lyrics and you’ll be greeted with full-length previews of the music streamed from Lala.com or MySpace Music.

Click on a song and the Lala streaming player pops up to play a full-length sample with a Buy MP3 button. Some songs are streamed from MySpace and only offer a :30 preview with the option to purchase the whole song.

According to Google, two of every ten searches is music-related, so it was logical to implement a feature like the Music Search to suit the needs of users. But industry observers, like Nigel Kendall, Technology Editor for the London Times, seem to think this move by Google is a direct assault on Apple’s stranglehold of the digital music market (holding firm at 69% in the first half of 2009, according to an NPD Group report).

Google’s Music Search will impact the music industry by driving music-related search traffic to selected partners. It could be a strategy of exclusion, but at heart it is a natural evolution of Google’s search engine.

Any music service that isn’t included in the partnership (here’s looking at you iTunes Store, Amazon MP3 Store, and GrooveShark) is essentially locked out of a ubiquitous consumer channel.

This development raises many questions, just to name a handful:

- How much of a boost in sales will Google’s partners see?
- How much will this impact sales/traffic on non-partner music services?
- How will Google’s partner lineup change (or not) over time?
- How will Microsoft’s Bing change to meet user’s heightened expectations?
- Will Microsoft integrate Zune Marketplace into Bing results, or will it rely on partners?
- Will Apple open up the iTunes Store to external search engines?

It’s worth noting that there is no money exchanged between Google and its partners to facilitate the Music Search results. Google benefits from being able to provide users with a better experience, and the partners benefit from the traffic driven to them from the world’s largest search engine.

This is fascinating on so many levels: business, cultural, and technological.

The barriers to finding and consuming culture (be it music, movies, literature, etc.) are falling at a rapid pace while the purchase process has already been reduced to a single click of the mouse.

I can remember the days when finding rare albums and out of print music was a drawn-out scavenger hunt conducted in any and every music store you came across, and finding new music was limited to what was available in the stores. I wanted to purchase music, but the barrier to purchase could be very high.

What used to be an exercise in patience suddenly became an act of instant gratification with the advent of online services such as eBay, Napster, and Amazon in the late ‘90s.

Since then, many tools and services have been developed to monetize and evolve the on-demand, easy-access nature of music, but Google’s Music Search is noteworthy because it has the benefit of instantly becoming the most ubiquitous music search engine on the Internet. There’s no software to download or accounts to sign up for.

Google has removed the learning curve, and brought us closer to our music – new and old.

Damn, it’s good to live in the future.

Tags: amazon, apple, digital music, download, ease of use, ecommerce, Google, grooveshark, ilike, imeem, instant, itunes, lala, microsoft, mp3, music, music industry, myspace, napster, new feature, on demand, online retail, partnership, purchase, results, rhapsody, search, search engine, stream, streaming, Technology, traffic, user experience

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Technology, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.