The Future of the Music Business

You might have already noticed this, but Google has recently added a feature to its search that allows people who search for a song or band to be able to stream and buy the music tracks. I tried to search Owl City, an artist that has had one of the best selling MP3s lately. At the top of the search results I got a list of four of his songs to with play buttons to stream them, a link to stream more from Lala.com, plus more links to listen to the song on Rhapsody, Pandora, and iMeem. After clicking on Fireflies, a popup player opened and streamed the whole song from Lala and included a link to purchase the MP3 for $0.89.

I’ve noticed that some songs are streamed from Lala and some are streamed from Myspace Music. I’ve also learned that it only streams the full song once per person per song so the next time I search for Owl City and play Fireflies, I will only get a 30 second clip of the song. Not bad though.

I decided to do some searches to find out if google would stream bands that aren’t the number one downloaded song on itunes. There was a band from my home state of South Dakota who released a few albums on an indie record label that was also based in South Dakota, but the band broke up a couple years ago. Their name was Sinking Steps… Rising Eyes and a google search brought up some of their songs!

Next, I thought of a band that I saw play at a small show in a youth center four years ago. They toured the US once or twice and released two albums, but they were not signed to a record label. In fact, they were known for giving away all their CDs for free to anyone that wanted one. I typed The Pax Cecilia into google, not expecting to see streaming links. I was wrong!

Google has done a great job with adding this feature to their search engine. They made a deal with these online music streaming services that does involve any money being paid to Google. It was done purely to improve their search engine and I believe that it will also improve the popularity of legal online streaming and MP3 sales. Thanks Google!