N

You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

November, 2009

Google Music: More Evil?

Questioning the implications of Google Music Search's priority for 'online retailers' over band websites.
An interesting perspective on what the new Google Music Search really means. (For those that missed the news, "Now, when you enter a music-related query -- like the name of a song, artist or album -- your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala.") Anyway, back to the interesting perspective:
Why should a song file from an "online retailer" come up first in search results instead of the band's own web site? How fair is that? What is this going to do to online strategies for bands? I thought the Internet was supposed to create a level playing field? And, surely Google is going to be serving up ads on these pages. How will the ads appear in the search results and how does that money get split up?
Google continues to run into this "evil" problem as they need to make tough decisions about what to prioritize, where. They're treading a very fine line as a company that uses data we create and serves it back to us, increasingly rearranging not in their original vision (ranked in order of what we think is most relevant), but rather in order of what makes them the most money.
November 2, 2009
©
Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.