Google Music Search

» see google.cn/music as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 30 March 2009 Google China launched a music search that gave away licensed major-label music for nothing. Over a million tracks at the start, growing toward several million, from 140 labels including Sony Music and EMI alongside Warner and Universal. The files were DRM-free. They were watermarked, but only so that somebody could count how many had moved. You searched for an artist, you got the song, and the bill was paid by the advertising sitting next to the results.

No other Google product of that decade was this generous, and it existed for one reason. China's music market in 2009 ran almost entirely on piracy, Baidu's MP3 search was the front door to it, and the labels had spent years losing lawsuits over that. Google's offer was to beat free with free, legally, and split the advertising money with the rights holders afterward.

I could not have loaded it if I had wanted to. The service was restricted to machines holding a mainland Chinese IP address, so the product checked where you were sitting before it would show you a single result. Everything I know about this product I know from the press coverage of its launch and the press coverage of its closure, three and a half years apart.

~ the record ~

~ the deal ~

Google did not hold the licenses. A Beijing company called Top100.cn did, owned by Orca Digital and known in Chinese as Whale Music, and it operated the actual download portal that Google's results pointed into. Google was Top100.cn's largest shareholder, which is how a joint venture this strange got built at all: the search giant brought the traffic and the ad sales, the smaller company carried the label contracts and the legal exposure.

Revenue split three ways after that, between Google, Top100.cn and the labels. For the record industry it was the first time anyone had made a Chinese free-music proposition that paid them anything, and the catalog commitments they made to it were real.

~ what it survived ~

In March 2010 Google stopped censoring its Chinese search results and redirected google.cn to Hong Kong, which is generally remembered as the moment Google left China. The music service did not leave. It carried on inside the mainland for another two and a half years, geofenced and ad-supported, long after the search engine that launched it had been routed offshore.

~ the aftermath ~

Senior engineering director Boon-Lock Yeo announced the closure on 21 September 2012 with the sentence every killed Google product gets: "the product's influence never quite reached as high as our expectations for it." Users had until 19 October to download whatever playlists they had stored. Staff were reassigned, and Google said it would keep pursuing bold and brave ideas elsewhere.

Top100.cn took the harder hit. Its chief executive, Gary Chen, said 70 percent of the company's user base had been arriving through Google's music search, and announced a pivot toward China's mobile internet. A licensed free-music business that had just lost seven of every ten visitors was not going to recover, and Whale Music did not outlast the decade either.

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