Google has confirmed all the recent speculation by stating that on Wednesday it had launched a music search feature on its Chinese website with contributing partner Top100.cn

From a rumour that first surfaced in early February in The Wall Street Journal, this has now confirmed that Top100 had signed a deal with Google. Top100.cn is a start up which was founded by Chinese NBA star Yao Ming, along with businessman Ge Chen.

This partnership between Google and Top100 hopes to become a more competitive search engine, as Baidu remains the dominant search in China. This looks like to be an interesting rivalry as Baidu currently has around two-thirds of the search traffic in the country, with Google only managing 26 percent. Another interesting fact is that 30 percent of Baidu’s traffic comes from its music search engine alone, it appears that Google has done their homework and are ready to mount a challenge for the top spot.

It’s not all sun and glory for Baidu however as their music search engine contains unlicensed content and that has angered the music industry. Google has another tactic to conquer this as they and Top100 plan to sweeten the labels by giving them a portion of the revenue from displaying various adverts on the service’s pages.

They also plan to give tracks out for free, and without DRM, in MP3 format. There is also talk of a partnership with China Mobile to sell ‘ringback tones’ to customers through the service. Sounds like this could be a successful venture for Google, stay tuned to hear more news on this story as we hear it.

Source: Read