Rumors of Google getting into the online music business began months ago. This week reports from Business Insider say the search engine giant was close to buying a popular digital music service, narrowing their choice to either Rhapsody or Spotify. A separate BI report says Google also wants to build a music “locker” for users to store already purchased music in the cloud available for streaming on Android and other devices.
Google seems determined to get a piece of the online music business enjoyed by Apple and others. According to an unnamed BI source with purported knowledge of Google’s online music ambitions, Google was “close” to making a move to acquire a popular music subscription based service, but dumped plans after internal disagreements could not be settled.
With the subscription music strategy on hold, at least for now, Google is focusing its attention on the music locker concept. Google‘s locker service would allow users to store their music collection in the cloud for on demand streaming to multiple devices, but will not sell music directly.
The challenge with Google’s locker service is getting the major record label companies on board with the idea. Historically, record labels are not comfortable with downloadable music, and have accused many online music storage services of allowing illegal sharing, in some cases launching legal attacks against them.
Another challenge to overcome is the view by record labels that Google is part of the music sharing problem by allowing “illegal” download websites to be easily found in its search engine. A recent study by British Phonographic Industry claims that 58 percent of illegal downloaders use Google to find free music. A quick search in Google on a popular music artist with the keywords “mp3” or “download” often show peer-to-peer file sharing websites on the very first results page, sometimes occupying over half the results on the page. The recording industry wants Google to remove “illegal” file sharing websites from the search engine results making them harder to find.
Negotiation with record labels has not yet begun, but sources say Google is prepared to spend “tens of millions” of dollars to get them to warm up to their plans. To get full support from the record labels Google may have to do more than write a big enough check, and may have to agree to tighter copyright protection in their search engine algorithms.
Charles Pullman