Is Google Music Search A Game Changer?
(ANALYSIS) As impressive an undertaking as it is, and even though it's great seeing so many diverse players working with instead of against each other; last night's announcement by Google, MySpace, lala and all the other partners is probably not a game changer.
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sophisticated music search and the opportunity for fans to listen and
buy wherever they land are attractive and powerful, but as yet not completely proven, concepts. Fans have always found ways to learn about and support the music that they care about But increasingly music
purchase and ownership are less important to fans.
We are on the verge of being able to listen to what we want, when and where we want for free or a low monthly fee. That, not Google search, is the game changer. – Bruce Houghton
Full Story: Google Supersizes Music Search
I completely agree — this has gotten hyped out of proportion. It’s a modest improvement to music searches. Or maybe music fans just couldn’t find any music on the internet before, and download sales will double across the board? Heh. But it might make a slight difference to sync licensees, in terms of viewers being able to find the song in the ~10 second window between hearing it on the TV and completely forgetting about it.
I’ve got a lot to say on this subject, too. Please follow this link:
http://www.celestialjukebox.org/2009/10/google-music.html
Maybe not a game changer, but certainly closer to the end-zone.
@Neil – you are spot on with your analysis of the sync licenses.
@Driver49 – you make great points in your articel…its only an incremental change. “the game changed 10years ago”
@Bruce – I completely agree…I was very unimpressed with the actual improvements. It wont really make any difference to avid music fans who already frequent p2p sites, blogs & services where they can access anything they want.
(as we have learned, access > ownership)
I was really hoping this was going to be more like Google China.
-Danny
Completely overblown – I was excited when I heard Google was going to do something music related and cannot express how underwhelmed I am at their announcement.
And Bruce you said: We are on the verge of being able to listen to what we want, when and where we want for free
That is where my friends and I have been for years. I don’t think there is anything the industry could do to get us back to spending what we did when we were younger. Mind you we still support local bands, artists we like, buy merch etc. but we also have access to far more music than we ever did before. Labels don’t even exist where I acquire most of my music these days and that’s not my fault.
As this feature is only available for IP adresses from the US, I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.
But it surely allows for plenty of sponsored links in its search results. You know, Boolean operators ain’t what they used to be.
Seen with googley eyes, the most popularly searched album or track automatically translates to the bestselling one. I’m not buying that.
But the fact that the most popular searches come up first when using a search engine, has indeed made it somewhat difficult to find out about new and / or obscure titles from favourite artists when not knowing the exact titles of these releases, which is really sad, because it’s exactly that what the internet used to be very good for when it comes to music discovery.