This is a fascinating and informative article, Philipp, thanks!

I would really like to see Google Labs offer a similar service outside of China, for Creative Commons music (of which there is plenty). I'm sure this would be a catalyst for future change in music distribution in Western countries.

Boring. Google is behind the times when it comes to music search. See Pandora, Last.fm, Echonest, etc.

It took me a while to read the whole Article but it was worth it.

The idea behind Pandora and last.fm (find similar music according to the tempo, used instruments and other things) is great, but in reality everything they add to a radio station is music "with similar tags". It's not even possible to exclude a tag so if you here a soundtrack to a movie it plays a lot of other soundtracks which have nothing in common with the music you love except they were all tagged with soundtrack...

Regarding this article it looks like google is nearer the "real thing" than the others. But when I read articles about pandora it sounded exactly the same, so is the thing with the music analyzes besides tags at Google Music just a plane for the future or is it already working?

Is there a working proxy in China which we could use to test this?

Stephan, if you send me a list of a couple of songs, I could search Google Music for them and tell you which related songs Google suggests (provided I find your songs, and provided Google shows related music for them... they don't do that with all songs...).