Computing Tips

The world's largest search engine Google is going to press Apple on the market of online music starting new service for downloading music. It’s known that Google has reached an agreement already with such labels as Universal, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI. If Google will will get it the music market has all chances to come to the Internet finally. It looks that Google intends to announce the new service next week.

 The new service is supposed to be a music search engine, which will allow the user to pre-listen to songs, videos, texts and articles related to the artist, all will be given in the search. The main task of the new service - providing the user the option to purchase music tracks. Providing this capability Google is going to cooperate with popular sites ILike and Lala.

The new service will be called One Box. "Radio has lost its mojo" for promoting songs, says Phil Leigh, president of market research firm Inside Digital Media. "When new releases come out, people do a Google search." Programs such as Google's are mostly aimed at consumers who only want to purchase a single song, says eMusic CEO Daniel Stein. But he says that while details about his talks with Google are confidential, "perhaps we'll participate in this type of program in the future."

Google isn't the only company trying to beef up its music offerings. Facebook this week will introduce an arrangement with Lala that makes it possible for people to buy songs and give them to friends without leaving the social-networking site. Transactions will be simple to initiate via an icon on user pages that "is as prominent as the icons for photo and video," says Lala founder Bill Nguyen.