Google China has taken the beta label off its dedicated, free MP3 search engine now that the local Google branch announced deals with all four major music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony) at a press conference earlier today. The website, which had been in beta for over a year, can be found here, or you can try the translated version (note that you won’t be able to download or listen to songs outside of the country).
The site offers over a million music tracks thanks to a partnership with Top100.cn (a company co-founded by basketball start Yao Ming which Google has invested in), most of them Chinese but also foreign tunes approved by the government. For example, users can download the latest Metallica album free of charge, of which you can see a screenshot below. Apart from the four labels mentioned above, several major publishers and 140+ indie labels are said to be on board.
Google will share ad revenue sold on the music site, generating sales for record companies in a market where 99% of all downloads are illegal, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Google is making this move to gain more ground on Baidu, the leading search engine in China, which has been offering free MP3s for years, part of the reason why it became the leader in the first place (it has roughly double the market share in search than Google). A Baidu representative has already responded to the launch of the new MP3 search engine, saying Google is entering the game too late and that this particular ship has long sailed.
The niftiest part of the music search engine is the Songscreener, an innovative way to discover new tunes based on your current mood and more specific details like the tone, timbre, age, language and genre of music you would like to explore. Google is also said to be experimenting with a voice search feature for the music search engine.
The company has no plans to expand the service outside of China, a representative told Reuters.
(Hat tip to Web2Asia – via Twitter – and Outdustry)
Well, that’s a good news for us.
Let chinese do whatever.. People with no ethics deserve utter neglect. Let them do whatever they want. http://www.voan...03-30-voa11.cfm
shut up retard. they dont have money to buy mp3s because they barely have enough money to survive.
people like you make the rest of us in the US look bad, so shut up.
It’s really great to hear some new tech news and that’s the reason I come to tech crunch. It is great news that they have huge amount of mp3’s for free.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
We have been waiting a good news from google about china. So, this is a good way and news.
http://www.egitisim-blog.com
i am a Chinese, Google’s music search is very good,and beautiful,creative…
I am French and I use this:
http://binyamin...-mp3-downloader
It works!
Well, I guess in some ways this is a good idea because the partnership between the music labels and search engine is going to do more than previously, when they simply lost so much revenue from the illegal downloads. But isn’t it also giving in to the illegal users, in many ways? Isn’t it kind of like saying that if 99% of a country’s citizens became murderers, we should just make murdering legal? Or is there a notable difference here?
depends on what you consider “illegal” to be… not everyone views certain laws the same way as you do and as people in our country do….
an unjust law is no law at all… and thats how a majority of people feel about being so limited in sharing music by the record labels
Suppose a country has X many people. It is very for 99% of these people to become murderers.
Suppose 50% of your country becomes a murderer and is alive – they must have killed the other half, hence there is no one else left to be a murderer.
You might suggest that 99 % X people form a circle and administer poison to the person left to them, which would indeed reach the 99% ratio, but then many of these people would not achieve murderer status before they die.
Also, of the remaining 1% alive, none of them are murderers, so actually the society becomes 0% murderer society.
One other scenario, of course, is that murderer 1 kills an innocent, and achieves murderer status while alive. Then murderer 2 kills murderer 1, etc. This way we’d have at least one murderer alive at all times, and many people will be classified as murderers before they die. This is still imperfect of course.
Another problem with that approach is that if your country has a few million people, and let’s say, every person being murdered takes 10 seconds to die, this would indeed take a long time. For every 1 million people in a country, it’d take a bit less than 116 days.
Co-murderer status is the only practical solution. People gather in groups of hundred, and 99 people kill the same person, and this shouldn’t take too long in an organized country.
Hence we achieve 99% murderers in original population X, and 100% murderers in the remaining population. As these people make children, the new population will also decline to a 99% murderer population, as desired.
It is possible to make the new and old population 99% murderers in a shorter timescale, but the solution is involved and won’t fit the margins of this comment.
Bad analogy.
More like if 99% of the population is smoking weed, let’s make it legal and start taxing it to generate revenue
This is good for now the bad part comes when google decides it wants to be the record label, then we will see how not evil google is.
This type of ad-supported model has already been shown to be unprofitable (Ruckus, SpiralFrog). The only way to get the revenue is with an engagement model, like TurnItUp Media (http://www.turnitupmedia.com). Free music in exchange for users’ engagement with advertisers.
Sean
Of course, this is going to be very useful one not just for me (because I really love music) but also to others who also love music.
It’s a shame MP3 download doesn’t seem to be working for me in Taiwan (which according to the People’s Republic of China is a province/”Special Administrative Region” of China). Then again, we access most of our web pages at more than triple the speed the mainland can. Guess, I’ll be sticking with Baidu
How about Hong Kong people, any luck in your “Special Administrative Region”?
Confused……..how are they going to convince people to buy downloads from them if there is no enforcement of the ‘illegal’ downloads?
@fire, @Sean: These are *free* downloads. I’d be surprised if the music labels seriously expect to make any money from this – the point is to wean people off Baidu’s completely illegal service.
Baidu actually host the MP3s on their own servers which is outrageous – they’re listed on the NASDAQ and I don’t understand why the record companies prosecute home file-sharers but let Baidu get away with industrial piracy. TechCrunch isn’t helping by describing them as “the leading search engine” – if you discount illegal MP3 searches, Google’s Mainland market share is now equal with Baidu.
I’m in mainland China, and I’ve been using the service for a year – it’s excellent. Buying legal music is very difficult here (even major supermarket chains stock pirated stuff), and the fact that it’s free of charge is an amazing bonus.
@Alex Trup: If you want to experience the wonders of life in the People’s Republic, you should stop co-operating with the bandits!
Alternatively, you could obey the laws of the authorities who grant your visa/citizenship and buy music legally…. the benefits you boast of come with responsibilities too.
I had 500+ visitor from Baidu to my website this month. I wondered what that China traffic was.
hi guys, we created a walk-through of Google Chinas new mp3’s search & download service at http://www.web2...hina-explained/
http://binyamin...-mp3-downloader
This is very cool stuff!
Thanks.
Baidu isn’t too far off of Google as far as generating real and sustainable profits+growth. Google will do whatever it takes to make sure it gets a decent share of the growth that will* take place in China. That being said, any service like this is worth double checking with an independent site like This one.
Try http://www.soundzet.com is a mp3 search engine for freee on all languages
Nice Blog and God Article. will be sucess blog in the future.
Thnks a lot.
Did they cover major Chinese record labels such as Rock Records, HIM, CRC and Amusic as well as the big four international labels. After all most song downloaded in China are Chinese music rather than say Metallica , and only a minority of Chinese artists are signed on international labels.
I search though the Google site, very impressed the collection. It’s even has a regional record label from my hometown, featuring local folk music. Looks like they left no stone unturned.
http://www.musicbiatch.com/
The World’s Greatest Music Search Engine!