I listened to a great podcast recently of a Columbia University SIPA sponsored talk by Kai-Fu Lee on Google’s many different efforts to compete in the China market (Find their China site easily at g.cn). One of the things Lee mentioned was the initial difficulty of competing with the MP3 downloads available, often illegally, through Baidu, their now scandal plagued competitor.
Google went into some kind of licensing agreement with Chinese music distributors and now provides download of a lot of Chinese music in an even easier fashion than that of their competitors. The service, however, is only provided to Chinese users with a Chinese IP address to avoid cannibalizing the music industry’s income outside of the mainland where illegal music download is, unlike China, somewhere below 100% of the available market.
I have to say, having now used this Google China service, I’m very impressed. This is really like the old Napster days back with a vengeance, at least for Chinese music – but this time it is actually legal!
Here is a step by step demonstration of how one gets the MP3 of a song in China through Google:
1. Search for the song’s name. Google Suggest, unlike the US, is on by default in China because, as Kai-Fu Lee says, “Typing Chinese is hard.”
2. If google recognizes the search item as a song it knows, above other web links for the given search, you will get album art and a series of special music links, including direct links for listen (试听), download [as MP3] (下载), link for the artist, etc.
3. Click on the download link, and a pop-up window results, showing the size of the file, its format (MP3), and a big green download button. There is also a banner advertisement, where I presume some of the revenue is generated for the music industry.
Click the download button, and you will soon have a downloaded 192kbps quality MP3 of 许巍’s song 难忘的一天, complete with lyrics. Unfortunately, the encoding of the metadata is not Unicode so it doesn’t show up correctly in iTunes, but it is easy enough to copy/paste this info from the Google download window.
The ease of this process really impressed me. Google China and the Chinese music industry are way ahead of the game here. I don’t know if they have found this distribution mechanism to be profitable but from the user’s perspective, this is really hard to beat.