Google Will Play Music

Apparently newspaper articles, magazine features, encyclopedia entries, blogs, images, and entire books aren’t enough. Next week, Google will begin offering free and paid songs on the main results page of search pages, The Wall Street Journal reports. Musical selections will be aggregated from four online services and consolidated into what Google describes as a “one box,” at the top of the page (like Google weather and stock results). Songs and samples will be provided by Lala.com, iLike, iTunes, and Amazon.com. Warner Music, EMI Group, Sony, and Vivendi—the four major record labels—are all on board, along with a variety of independent labels. Google considers the addition of music a way to optimize users’ experience rather than a profit-building enterprise, and sales will be split between the record labels and music services.