Google To Offer Free & Legal Downloads In China
This is very interesting.
According to The Washington Post:
“Google has expanded the breadth of its music search engine in China, signing deals with all four major record labels to put their tracks on the site. The service, launched in August, lets users look up songs by singer, song, album title or beat and then download MP3s for free. Initially, the search engine had about 350,000 songs. With the addition of EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music the site’s catalogue will jump to 1.1 million songs. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music,” Lee Kai-Fu, the president of Google in greater China, tells Reuters.
The music search engine is a major part of Google’s strategy to compete with Baidu, which dominates the search market in China. A substantial portion of Baidu’s traffic comes from searches for MP3s. But many of the MP3s Baidu links to are illegal, and Baidu has been sued by the major labels for linking to them. Google’s service promises to offer legal and higher-quality tracks.” Continue Reading
