JUST IN: Google, MySpace, Facebook Make Music

Yesterday, Google, MySpace and Facebook all launched or announced new plans for adding Music services to their venues. They will all retail through other sites but offer widgets or interfaces to peruse,stream, and purchase music through various means.

In early August 2008 , Google launched it’s Music Service OneBox in a market where Music services such as iTunes , Rhapsodyand the like were unheard of . The service directs users to Top100.cn, a site that names as an investor basketball star Yao Ming, to download or stream music for free.Users outside of China were blocked from downloading from OneBox.

Now, forwarding the  effort  for Google and the recording companies to promote alternatives to Apple Inc.’s iTunes, the leader in song downloads, next week (now confirmed Wednesday, October 28) Google Inc. will launch music search pages that will package images of musicians and bands, album artwork, links to news, lyrics, videos and song previews, and allow purchasing of songs on one search results page.

Google will not be the music retailer itself, but will offer enhanced music search with a streaming function — first of possibly several vertical search offerings. Searching for an artist or song will apparently bring up a box (assumed title: “One Box”) with a streaming link randomly assigned to stream songs from either Lala or iLike, the latter of which was acquired by MySpace in August.The service will include music from all four major labels and, most likely, all of the indie content on iLike and Lala.

Lala, iLike, “and others” will announce the service next Wednesday at Capital Records Music in Hollywood, California, with musical guests OneRepublic plus members of Linkin Park and Dead by Sunrise.

It is important to point out that Google will not get a share of song sales.It will, however,  collect revenue from advertising that will be shown with the search results.

These screen shots  was obtained from TechCrunch:

MySpace announced Wednesday it is replacing YouTube videos on its iLike music recommendation service with its own licensed videos. As you may recall, MySpace bought iLike for $20 million earlier this month, .The videos will have a dedicated MySpace Music Videos page and be featured more prominently on artist pages and in search results on both MySpace and on the Google music search service.

MySpace Music is a joint venture between MySpace and the four recording companies. With this new service, MySpace-branded videos will be playable inside iLike applications embedded on competing social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Orkut and hi5.Advertising embedded in the videos will benefit the MySpace Music.

Overlaid ads will be included with the videos. They are slightly translucent and don’t interrupt the video. By clicking buttons on the ads, viewers can easily buy song downloads from Amazon.com. or Apple  iTunes’ music store. Portions of these  purchases will go to  a small fee for MySpace.Purchases will use Facebook’s payment system whereby customers buy credits worth 10 cents each with a credit card. In this system, for example, Nine-credit song downloads will be of higher quality than one-credit streaming song gifts.

Starting today(Thursday, October 22) Facebook will  gradually begin to allow friends to send each other 10-cent Web songs to stream online or 90-cent songs in the MP3 format that recipients can download as gifts from online retailer Lala.It follows their “virtual gifting” of  birthdaycakes, presents and the like which are purchased for a dollar (with 10 facebook credits).

Write in if you were one of the lucky ones to get access to Facebook Music or have tried out MySpace and Google’s Services.