New Google Music Onebox Lets US Users Play Music

Thursday, October 29, 2009

New Google Music Onebox Lets US Users Play Music

Google has rolled out a new music onebox for the US. Using a US proxy and starting from this music page, I triggered the above results for momus (just searching from Google didn’t work, as an esrch=... parameter was needed). Clicking a link from the top music selection opens up a small player device hosted at lala.com. Another partner is MySpace, though Lala was the one only one I spotted so far in my sample searches.

The music itself did not playback from the proxies I tried, but stopped at the loading process. A link to the buy the MP3 is included in the popup as well. [Can someone from the US let us know if these songs are played back in their entirety, or if they’re just shorter previews? How long do they play? (Google’s blog post speaks of previews, which suggests they’re cut off at some time.)]

The amount of songs covered doesn’t look too bad – Google in a blog post mentions “millions of songs” – but I’ll have to stick to Google.cn Music here in China for now, which has a neat (though also unfortunately georestricted) standalone site.

[Thanks BizAbh and MBegin!]

Update: Mbegin explains:

All of my samples were hosted at lala.com too – It plays the full song, but only one time. If you try to play the song again it only plays a 30 second clip and has this message:

<<With Lala, you can hear one full length preview per song. Each subsequent play will be a 0:30 clip. To hear the full song, buy the MP3 on Lala.>>

Also, you can pause and mute, but you cannot fast forward or rewind.

[Thanks Mbegin!]

New Google Music Onebox L ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9+14)

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