The wait is over. . . kinda.
If you’re one of our many readers from India you’ll be able to find a new feature in your Google Labs. Thats right, Google Music has launched under the name Indic. It’s a very slimmed down verison of what the Google music service could look like when it finally reaches the North America and Euorpe very soon.
Indic Music enables users to search through an expansive library of Hindi artists on Google, view entire albums, and play songs for free in ad-supported pop-up music player. It doesn’t have auto-play like Pandora or Rhapsody–music can only be played on a per-track basis.
The project is part of a partnership between Google and Indian music sites Saavn and In.com, as well as India’s largest record label, Saregama. The three companies provide the service with hundreds of thousands of tracks. Google acts as a centralized database for the music.
Indic Music is a far cry from the promising rumors of Google’s “locker,” a cloud-based service that would give subscribers access to unlimited streaming tracks for a monthly fee.
Instead, the Labs project is more akin to YouTube: Users can find and listen to pretty much any song online, but it’s more a one-off service than a replacement to, say, iTunes.
But there is good news here: Google has finally found some success working with third-party streaming sites and record labels–albeit in India. A similar marriage has failed to develop in the U.S. Last fall, Google attempted to build a similar service on top of MySpace and LaLa that did not pan out–but let’s hope this new feature serves as some indication that such a wedding is possible. (More here)
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