Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Illustrated Google Wishlist: Google Music

Thanks to everyone commenting in the Google Wishlist thread. I’m illustrating a wish below. All screenshots shown in this post are my mockups & all descriptions are hypothetical, and any similarity to actual products, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

What’s Google Music?

Google already got music searching capabilities. Search for pixies today, and you’ll be presented with a onebox which takes you to music results... and there’s also an existing Google Music Trends page. Google Music Search on the other hand will be a more complete package offering a Midomi.com-style “sing-or-whistle-to-find” feature as well.

The two search capabilities are split on the frontpage. Google Music includes a library of millions of songs, and has excellent pattern matching capabilities. Not only will you be able to sing a song to find lots of versions of it to buy (just hit the “Record” button, and the button will turn into a small sound recording progress indicator)...

... but also, every song stored in Google’s database will be automatically analyzed to be categorized as blues, rock, hip hop and so on. This allows you to search by genre in the advanced settings, and it also helps you find similar music based on your current favorites by clicking through a genre-sorted directory, or picking “similar music” links from result pages.

Depending on your query, the search result will list albums or sole tracks. Every album listed contains a plusbox to expand its tracks, which you can then listen to for 30 seconds or so, and decide to buy as (completely non-DRM’ed) MP3. The MP3 will be bought with Google Checkout, and automatically integrated into your Google Tunes application, which optionally synchronizes with your desktop/ iTunes.

Google’s MusicRank algorithm to order search results gives slight preference to Creative Commons-licensed music, as these tracks can be freely and fully played & downloaded... this will become a perfect way for a band to give away 1 or 2 songs from their album as free versions while offering the rest for sale.

Illustrated Google Wishli ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

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