Marketing.fm – Eric Friedman

Google announced the ability to search, find, and play music via their search experience tonight.

This is a huge business development boon by the companies involved and a major kudos goes to Imeem, MySpacePandora, LaLa, and Rhapsody. This also seems like a big win for the record labels.

Below is a video that explains ramifications of bringing the power of Google search to music, lyrics, titles and others:

This Google onebox deal has far reaching implications for a few different reasons.

It first deep links to music site providers giving users a (hopefully) better experience.
It provides a monetization strategy for music providers to help people find and discover new music.
It provides a revenue stream to music providers, and most likely Google, when a sale or transaction happens as a result of this deal.

Each of those requires their own analysis and explanation which I will not go into now.

The bigger paradigm change in my mind is the change to search results. How do you optimize for this type of query? What will happen to ad CPC’s associated with these queries? Can you target or message things differently now that the behavior on Google.com is changing?

I think this brings up far bigger questions and only time will tell how people react.

To date, the goal of Google has been to get you off the page as quickly as possible. This Google Music initiative certainly changes that dynamic greatly, and actually invites you to interact and spend meaningful amounts of time on a Google page.

I certainly look forward to trying out this feature, and would love to hear from others on their thoughts about this new initiative by Google.