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LINKS | Noah Brier

Google Music: More Evil?

November 2, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 1 COMMENTS

An interesting perspective on what the new Google Music Search really means. (For those that missed the news, "Now, when you enter a music-related query -- like the name of a song, artist or album -- your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala.") Anyway, back to the interesting perspective:

Why should a song file from an "online retailer" come up first in search results instead of the band's own web site? How fair is that? What is this going to do to online strategies for bands? I thought the Internet was supposed to create a level playing field? And, surely Google is going to be serving up ads on these pages. How will the ads appear in the search results and how does that money get split up?

Google continues to run into this "evil" problem as they need to make tough decisions about what to prioritize, where. They're treading a very fine line as a company that uses data we create and serves it back to us, increasingly rearranging not in their original vision (ranked in order of what we think is most relevant), but rather in order of what makes them the most money.

via Catbird // Tags: business, google, music


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COMMENTS

1Aaron

Well, I think the main issue is that google wants to prvoide the right thing you were looking for based on your search. I'm sure the artist site (if coded well) would be in the first few items as well, as would the record label, and probably even amazon mp3 page.. since they all are linked to frequently. if the audio functionality is well received, i'd imagine google will expand their sitemap submission system to handle audio content as well, thus enabling artists to list (and host!) the music themselves.. that is, if they're even allowed to by their labels.

as long as google keeps giving me what i really want, after i enter a query.. it's not evil. no matter how they monetize it.

November 3, 2009