Google Lifts the Curtains on Its New Music Service

Music lovers, start your searches.

With a panel discussion and concert in West Hollywood this afternoon, Google is formally rolling out its new music search tool, Music Onebox. I first wrote about the new service last week.

Google users who put the name of a song into the search engine will get, as the top result, information about the musician and an opportunity to stream the song from one of two services, Lala and MySpace Music. People who click on that link will, in most cases, get a pop-up window that allows them to play the full song once, for free, along with a link to buy the song.

Entering an album name or band name into Google yields similar free listening opportunities.

The service could significantly change how people look for music online. Music searches on Google, heretofore, have typically generated links to Wikipedia, random ad-filled lyrics sites and, in some cases, YouTube videos. But it usually took a few hops across the Web to actually sample a song. Not anymore. (It will be interesting to see, in this new environment, whether the music labels are truly comfortable with allowing all these free streams on Google.)

There are also some new dimensions to the Google music announcement we did not cover last week. Through a relationship with Gracenote, now owned by Sony, Google is making it easier to plug lyrics into the search engine and instantly find and play a song. If you mistype or mishear a lyric, a feature called “Google Suggest” will list similar queries in an effort to steeryou to the right song.

Finally, Google has also forged relationships with three other music services Pandora, ImeemRhapsody. When users enter a song or album title into the search engine, Google will present links to those sites as well, where users can also play the song and find similar music. and No money is changing hands in any of these deals, and Google is not trying to create a free music buffet on its site. While there will be text ads in the right-hand column against the search results as there is with any Google search, there are no ads in the OneBox.

The goal, said R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management, is to better answer music queries, which routinely account for two of Google’s top ten searches in the United States. “The intention is not to turn the partners on Google into a free streaming music service. This is about providing a richer experience for users looking for a particular song,” he said.