Now, TechCrunch has announced that Google will be launching a full blown Music Search Service which will not only allow you to search for music, but also sample it, and buy it. Yesterday, TechCrunch reported of a possible tie-up between Google, iLike.com and Lala.com. Though TechCrunch did not get any comments from Google, iLike or Lala, they further went on to confirm the release of the music search facility. More so, the story seems realistic. TechCrunch supplemented their story with screenshots. The service is set to allow the user to search for music, and will come with a preview option.

Here’s a screenshot of the new service:

Whether true or not, (though the screenshots do lend veracity), Google launching Music Search is a cool idea.

With music sales going down and records not being sold, this might give the music industry it’s much-required breath of fresh air. People search for music and music reviews all the time. Last.fm is extremely popular, as are other online radios like live360.com.

How does it affect India?

Not very much actually, the Indian music scene is quite different when compared to the west. Songs are essentially marketing devices for the movie and hence, the more viral the song, the better the film’s hype. Now, Google Music does not recognize Hindi songs. I tried a Google Search for “music: Wake up Sid” and “music Wake up Sid“. The results were not really all that awesome. Also, the resources are primarily torrent sites.

The Music Search Industry is a huge business. Especially in India, where everyone loves music and more importantly, isn’t willing to pay extravagant amounts for it. So, is there a potential for Google Music / Google Audio coming to India. Unlikely.

It’s not that iLike doesn’t have Indian Music. I was mildly surprised to find Kuch Kuch Hota Hai while searching. Ditto with Google Music Search. It’s just the sheer enormity and diversity in Indian music. It’s not just Bollywood and Slumdog Millionaire as the West perceives it. The Tamil and Telugu music industry have huge fan bases. Sufi music, Carnatic, Hindustani resources are extremely difficult to find. I found three albums of T M Krishna on Google Music search. I admit, I found a LOT of songs on iLike.com, but was unable to purchase them through iTunes India – some error.

Now, we’ve covered the Indian Search Engine space pretty thoroughly. Guruji.com, boasts of being the best music search engine. I tried varied entries in Guruji, and boy was I impressed. From old Hindi to contemporary to Carnatic to Coldplay, they have most of it. We’ve covered info and features on Guruji.com earlier. Check here for more resources.

I tried searching for Wake Up Sid – Music on three different sources. Guruji.com, Google Music Search and iLike.com

(Please click on the pictures to see the full search results)

There is no doubt who takes the cake here at least.

The thing about Guruji is that it allows different people to use it differently. It allows you to listen to the song and/or download it. Aggregating from several other sites, that makes an impressive database of songs, indexed by artist, album and title.

For those picky about “stealing music” by downloading it illegally off the Internet, you may choose to listen to the song. Now, the ability to download is pretty cool, but it could attract law hassles in the future. www.in.com also has an impressive music collection, but without downloading ability.

Google does offer music downloads, but only in China. And that only after immense competition from Baidu, which also offers mp3 search. Now, you can’t download the songs if you’re not connected from China. I wonder though whether it’s proxy protected.

As of now, local search for music seems to be more impressive than international. Will that trend change? Music and Digital Media Rights are extremely picky issues and India barely has a concrete Intellectual Property Rights law in place.

Also, a song download from iTunes or Lala.com costs close to $1.5, which approximates to a Rs. 75. iTunes offers its more popular music at 0.99$, which is still Rs. 40. Will Indians ever pay that much for a song? When you get entire music collections for close to Rs. 300? One pirated CD costing Rs. 50 can get you close to 6 albums of current popular music. Can a service like Google Audio or GTunes as people have been referring to it as ever hope to compete in this environment?

So what’s the future of local music search? Will Google do something similar as they did in China?

Let’s see who’s competing with Google now internationally. This puts it in direct conflict with Apple’s iTunes. iLike was acquired by MySpace. So this could mean MySpace tying up with Google. If you remember our post on Bing indexing Facebook, there was no mention of Google. We’ve covered a lot of Facebook v/s Google articles in the past.

Just following the announcement of the two biggies in Search to index Twitter, I recently read this interesting article on Robert Scoble’s blog on how Facebook was losing out by tying with Bing and not Google, while Twitter did both.

So what about Facebook? Considering how much time people spend on it, wouldn’t it be cool if they too got into Music? What’s next Facebook v/s Google v/s Apple for the new king of entertainment and multimedia?