News: Google to launch new music service

News: Google to launch new music service

In an effort to keep up with the ever-changing times, record companies and industry bigwigs have been putting their heads together to think of ways to fight the all-powerful interwebs and its consumers thirst for new (and FREE) music. Enter Google.

In an effort to keep up with the ever-changing times, record companies and industry bigwigs have been putting their heads together to think of ways to fight the all-powerful interwebs and its consumers thirst for new (and FREE) music. Enter Google.

A year ago, record companies pitched an idea to the reigning search enginge for a launch of separate music pages.  Google is said to launch a music service that will combine their own search capabilitie, along with opportunities to stream and purchase songs from Lala.com and MySpace’s iLike.

Middleman
Google’s model will be called “One Box,” and will provide links to purchase songs and artist profiles, videos, images, album artwork, lyrics, and news–alll integrated into one page for the artist. Songs will be able to be streamed via the artist page, marking Google’s transition from the middleman between you and the information you want, rather becoming the destination itself. 

Skepticism
There is some skepticism about One Box, however. Lala and iLike offer free streaming for an initial stream of a song, but later charges its listeners. These purchased songs are known as “Web songs,” that cost about 10 cents ($1 for the full album) and can only be listened to through the respective services. Needless to say, this isn’t a really appealing model to people who are on the go and not necessarily going to be stititng in front of Lala all day.

Partnership
However, Lala has apparently gotten with the program and will be creating a free iPhone app that will allow people to listen to their downloaded songs wherever, storing up to 200 tracks. We’ll have to wait and see how this development plays out with their partnership with One Box, which is set to debut sometime later this week. 

Source: URB
More info: Spacelab
Screenshots: Here

Just an ordinary guy always on the hunt for extraordinary music. Not just as the founder of The Find Magazine & Rucksack Records, but also as a freelance music journalist (bylines at Tracklib, Bandcamp, Wax Poetics, DIG Mag, among others) and—above all—out of love for all kinds of good music.