Google Music Won’t Matter Much To The Indie SceneGoogle just launched a music service called “One Box”. It’s basically a collaboration between Google, MySpace and Lala. Google won’t become a music retailer or anything. It’s just going to let iLike(owned by MySpace) and Lala serve up the music in Google’s search engine.
It’s a win-win for everyone involved. MySpace and Lala get the traffic because you have to purchase the songs on their sites and Google gets more searches.
It’s been reported that the music will be coming from all 4 major labels, along with indie content on iLike and Lala. You can see the Kings of Leon search result to get a glimpse of what a search result looks like. The player is right there in the search result.
So what’s all this going to do for indie music? Probably nothing much. First, if you already have a presence on MySpace or Lala and somebody types in your band’s name in Google, your MySpace and Lala links will show up anyway. Why not just go directly to your profiles on those sites? The fact that I can hear your tracks directly in Google search isn’t going to make me any more likely to buy them.
Second, and more important, if people don’t know your band, they’re not going to do a search on you. People know Kings of Leon and U2 and other big bands. That’s why Google’s sealed a deal with the major labels; they own the known names. But if you’re an unknown band that performs at small venues like the majority of bands, people aren’t really going to be looking for you on Google, except for maybe your die hard fans. And they’ll probably find you on MySpace or directly on your website first anyway.
The basic lesson is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Sure, the long tail generates tons of money, but that’s in the aggregate. Top 40 may be dead, but just because the wealth of attention is being spread out doesn’t mean that everyone’s making money. Most bands won’t get much exposure and probably won’t make very much money for a long time, if ever…it takes hard work and time to climb to the top…or even the middle.
Google won’t save you. Only you will. But Google can grease the wheels if you put in the hard work.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Hmm… I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader.
November 6th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
google search results have no community. you want to talk with others about your findings. on myspace everybody is nice lying. the only place where people are real is last.fm. ilike was sold for 20 mil only, lala, rhapsody, etc is us only.
however: all music sides ally against the best system now.
intersting too the absolute #1s, facebook and youtube. they won the war already, no need for aliances.