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February 05, 2007
Is GooTunes in the works?
I was just trawling through Google's robots.txt and I found "/music" on the list of blocked-off URLs. I also found this post by Danny Sullivan from over a year ago about Google Music Search, which is linked to "/musicsearch". Neither of the two URLs led to anything useful when I checked, but they do lead to different error pages. If we take this to mean that they are not synonyms, then "/music" points to something other than a music search product. What might it be then? A Google Music Store, which we shall call GooTunes.
There is a lot of money in the rich media content business, one that Google is just flexing its muscles at with YouTube. If Google applies its devil-may-care attitude to selling music, we might actually see variable pricing implemented by a major company for the first time--not because the record labels want it but because consumers want it. Google might even take the user's side and try to offer entirely DRM-free music on GooTunes, but watch out Google--Amazon's forthcoming music store is rumored to offer DRM-free, variably priced music. No matter what sort of goodies Google puts into GooTunes, we can be sure it will make at least half the music industry (and Apple!) sit up and take notice.
One thing that worries me about this is that social applications have never been Google's strong suit. Online music stores have generated a lot of buzz not just because the iPod has been successful, but also because they bring together people with similar musical tastes. When you look at Pandora, last.fm and similar sites, it's easy to see that there is a strong social component inherent in the leading edge of innovation in digital music downloads. The question is, can Google execute on it?
Posted by Vishy at February 5, 2007 12:22 AM