Los Angeles — Google Inc. on Wednesday stepped onto the Internet music stage, unveiling a new music search feature making an alliance with those include Lala, Pandora, imeem, MySpace Music and Rhapsody, a subscription service from Real Networks, to give music fans an easier way to find, sample and buy songs on the Internet, expanding its music industry footprint.
The search engine partnered with several music service sites that are responsible for streaming the songs on Google’s search results pages. All those partnered have licensing agreements with record labels to stream or sample millions of songs online.
“We are very excited today to be introducing a music search feature,” Google vice president of search Marissa Mayer said on Wednesday before a demonstration of the new music service known as “OneBox”.
Searching for Coldplay, for instance, will deliver the band’s album cover art, in addition to four popular songs that users can play once for free.
“The search results will allow you to do a whole song play to verify it is the song you are looking for,” she said, rather than just the 30-second stream typical of most major online music providers.
Google began rolling out OneBox on Wednesday, with availability limited to the United States.
“I think this is a game-changing thing Google has done,” said Wendy Nussbaum of Universal Music Group. “The key thing for us is you are leading people to legitimate sources of music. Consumers want something easy, and Google gives them that."
In addition to providing search results, users searching for artists, songs or albums by name will receive links to audio previews and options to purchase tracks or albums from Google’s music search partners MySpace and Lala. A pop-up widget powered by iLike or Lala instantly appears with OneBox search results and offers to play the sought-after song.
The new service is also designed to help users locate songs by lyrics, if they do not know the full titles.
Google said that the new service “helps artists, labels, songwriters and music publishers by driving traffic to licensed online music services, thus providing a source of revenue and introducing music seekers to a new generation of online music search and discovery services like Pandora, iMeem, and Rhapsody.”
The Mountain View, Calif., search giant said it is not interested in competing with digital music retailers such as Amazon and Apple’s iTunes.
“We are not in the music business as such,” said R. J. Pittman, Google’s director of product for the music search project. “We do not license the music nor sell the music directly on Google. We are merely a music search feature.”
“This is pushing search traffic and business opportunities downstream to online partners and artists and labels, so we are happy to provide a great music experience and also direct lots of music-seeking traffic to partners that can take it from there and convert it to great music discovery,” Pittman said.
“Every day we get millions of search queries about music. You want to know more about your favorite artists, find that new album or that iconic song, or figure out the name of that tune stuck in your head,” Google said on its blog.
The four major record labels – Warner Music, EMI, Sony Corp’s Sony Music Entertainment and Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, have all licensed their catalogs for Google’s initiative, as reported in The Times last week. Many independent labels also are expected to take part.
Tom Stocky, Director of Product Management at Google, said, “The best answer to a query is frequently not a web page but a map, a video, an image or some other kind of content. This launch makes search better by adding music to the list of things we can connect people to speedily, as well as providing a revenue source for artists, labels and others.”
Google’s announcement will be seen as an indirect challenge to Apple’s iTunes, the download store that has become the world’s leading digital music retailer, which was responsible for 69% of U.S. digital music sales in the first six months of this year, and 35% of all music sales, including physical albums, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc. Amazon, the second-largest player, accounted for 9% of digital music sales and 10% of overall music sales.
Google’s new music service will launch today in the United States at www.google.com.