There is an interesting recent post about the history of Google Music in China from an article by Michael Zhang in Global Entrepreneur Magazine. Some excerpts:
“It will play the right music without you having to give it any thought.” You get the music you want at the right time, for the right environment, and in the right mood. Well, it sounds unrealistic that one’s thoughts can actually control music. Yet like the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Revolutionary technologies like electrical power, airplanes and search engines have all changed the world in ways that were out of expectation. To some extent, Google’s second edition of their music search product, launched on March 30 by Hong Feng and his team, fulfilled the criteria in some way. When Google China’s president Li Kaifu [who by now quit Google] and executives from hundreds of record companies posed for a photograph at the media conference, people might have ignored the fact that this product transcended reality on at least two levels.
They’re calling Google Music, an extremely late entrant into the music search business, a revolutionary, magical technology that transcends reality? Are you kidding me? Have they forgotten about Moodlogic (1998)? Shazam (2000)? Pandora (2000 or 2004, depending on whether you’re talking B2B or B2C)? Last.fm (2004)? Echo Nest (2005-ish?) How does Google Music China compare with the solutions provided by these other companies?
Google Music unprecedentedly enriched the way people find music. You can find a song through the name of artist, titles of the song, albums, or even a sentence of lyric, and you can also play the hottest songs from the charts. However, the most impressive breakthroughs are these two functions – one can have music recommendations according to difference of the tempo, tone, and timber; similar songs are recommended according to the timber of specific songs. Fresh experience it offers and the technical complexity in its realization makes it the most ambitious and imaginative work of Google after it entered China.
“Unprecedentedly”? Come on. It’s totally “precedented”. Continue reading…
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