The top 5 things in the digital music world that didn't happen in 2006
#4 - Google didn't think music was worth indexing - Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." To this end, Google has been innovating in text search, mapping software, and image search. Google is now working with libraries to digitally scan books from their collections and will start to add this data to its main search index. This book scanning effort has been controversial since Google is scanning books with out the approval of the publishers. But Google doesn't mind a fight - and is not shy about dealing with copyright holders. So with Google's mission to organize the world's information along with its willingness to go toe-to-toe with copyright holders one would think that Google would be building an index of music and music metadata and applying some of those nifty approaches used in the MIR community to allow people to find music and information about music. But instead of an all encompassing music index, Google has just stuck its toe in the music search water. It has released only a few music related search features. First there is Music Trends from Google labs - this is Google's version of Audioscrobbler - think of last.fm without all of the users or nifty features like song tagging, friends, tag radio, or recommendations. Then there's Google Music search which adds all sorts of information about an artist search result such as cover art, photos, reviews, links to buy the cd - pretty neat stuff, but a far cry from a real music search such as we see with Mp3Realm, Melody Hound or Mercora.
The
question is 'Why hasn't Google done for music what it is doing for
Books?' Why does Google seem to be ignoring its mission to
organize the world's information when it comes to music? Is it
because the music industry has more collective power than the book
publishing industry? Is it because Sergey doesn't listen to much music? Or perhaps Google is already building the ultimate music search index and will unleash it on the world in 2007.
Posted by Stephan on January 08, 2007 at 10:48 AM EST #
I've asked Google about indexing music many times over the years.. in 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2005. I've spoken with some fairly senior people: One of them wrote the AI textbook you probably used as an undergrad; one of them studied under information retrieval grandfather Gerard Salton. One of them was on the organizing committee for the original ISMIR (in 2000), but never showed up to the conference (I think he had just accepted a position at Google).
The first three times I spoke to them (2001-2004), Google's response was: "We are not doing music; we are afraid of copyright holders". I patiently explained to them that you do not need to fear copyright holders if you are searching your own collection, coming up with intelligent playlists for the thousands of songs you already own. You do not need to fear copyright holders if you are the intelligent search interface to Apple iTunes, the way you are to AOL. The rights are all taken care of, in those cases. But they reiterated their stance each time: No go. The last time (in 2005), they didn't say anything about copyright. They just said "We're not doing music." Period.
So from my own perspective, it seems like Google is not just ignoring its mission to organize the world's information when it comes to music. It seems like Google is actively trying not to do music. I haven't the faintest clue why.
But all the arguments you make about Google's willingness to go toe-to-toe with copyright holders is spot on. In fact, I think they probably have a better legally-defensible position in creating search technology that allows users to organize their own music collections (think: Google Desktop for your iPod) than they do in going in to libraries and making full, high-quality scans of books that they do not own.
And yet they do the latter, and not the former. I wish someone from Google would explain this to the rest of us.
Posted by Jeremy P on January 08, 2007 at 02:05 PM EST #
Posted by Paul on January 08, 2007 at 02:06 PM EST #
Posted by Stephan on January 10, 2007 at 10:11 AM EST #