MUMBAI: Internet giant Google has announced the closure of its legal music download service in China by next month. The company will culminate its service on 19 October and till then the Google Music Search users can download and stream their stored playlists.
The firm has taken the decision as the impact of the product did not match its expectations. “The impact of this product was not as high as we expected, so we decided to divert our resources to other products,” Yang Wenluo, Google China’s engineering research general manager, wrote on Google China’s blog.
The site was meant to be a legal music search competitor to Baidu Inc’s popular music service, which at the time was providing users with links to copyright-infringing music. But with the launch of legal music search in a landmark deal with record labels last year Baidu’s overall share has continued to grow.
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“We have decided to shut down our Google Music Search service in China. This is part of an ongoing effort across Google to bring greater focus to our portfolio of products,” said a company statement.
Earlier in 2010, Google had announced it would no longer be willing to comply with Chinese laws and censor searches in the world’s largest internet market and as a result, moved its Chinese site to Hong Kong and witnessed a decline in its overall search-market share.
Other Google products, such as Maps, search and Gmail, sometimes face accessibility issues in China. In June this year, Google launched a feature that would alert Chinese users searching on its Hong Kong site of words that were blocked.
China has over half a billion Internet users but operates in a closed ecosystem where Chinese Internet companies have to comply with local laws and censor topics deemed sensitive by the government. Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China.
