I read about the new interface of Google's music search service in China today on Aw's blog (link in Chinese). This brought my attention to this service which was established a (long?) while ago.
It is remarkable that the new interface enables people to discover music according to certain criteria, such as tempo, pitch, and tone. Genre and language filters are also available. But this is hardly amazing in this modern world. What surprises me is that Google offers music downloads, too. This is the search result for Onmyo-za, my favorite band at this time, who are unfortunately not really popular at least in Mainland, and Google still has 8 album entries for this band. Download quality is at 192 kbps, a rate at which compressed music is transparent to most ears.
Google is offering the music download in cooperation with top100.cn. According to their vision statement, the site intends not only to let users discover and download music, but to lead to music related purchases. Considering that they are in partnership with such big names as China Mobile and Google, the actual income from music sales might not be that important to this site. Therefore, it seems questionable if this free download model is a sensible business model by itself.
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