With Google throwing its weight around in an attempt to stop aMicrosoft-Yahoo tie-up that would threaten its dominance of theonline advertising industry in the West, the search engine giant ishaving to come up with cleverer ideas to bolster its standing in amarket where it is not No 1, China.
The company is trying to fix up a delicate deal with the world'sbiggest music companies so it can lure Chinese web users to its sitewith free music downloads.
In doing so, it hopes finally to make itself competitive againstBaidu.com, the upstart search engine which dominates the Chinesemarket and which gets a large proportion of its traffic from userssearching for illegal music.
Google hopes that it can tease out a deal from the music industryto allow it to give away music for free, in return for splitting anyadvertising revenue it can generate from music searches. Barely 10per cent of the music accessed in China is legally licensed in anycase, and Google hopes that record labels will see their proposal asa chance to undercut a culture of piracy.
At the moment, Google does not throw up links to pirated musicwhen users search the web. Instead, it guides them to a serviceoffering paid-for downloads, but this is only encouraging users tostick with Baidu, which allows users to stream unlicensed music.
Google believes this is one of the main reasons why Baidu has 60per cent of the search market in China, measured by revenues fromadvertising alongside search results. Google has 26 per cent.
Universal Music, the world's largest collection of record labels,home to U2, Mariah Carey and Eminem, has signed on to the free musicplan, which would be run through Top100.cn, a Beijing-based onlinemusic business. Google insiders are confident SonyBMG and EMI willalso sign up soon, while the fourth of the four major music groups,Warner Music, is also believed to have...

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