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Google Stops Offering Free Music Service In China
SquarePixel writes "Google has yanked its free music service in China after being unable to make it popular enough. The service offered Chinese people free licensed music downloads and was launched in 2009 to compete with the rival search engine Baidu. 'Once China's second largest search provider, Google has now fallen to fourth place, overtaken by other local companies. — Google's popularity in the country has waned ever since 2010, when the company pulled the plug on its China-based search engine following disputes with the government over censorship and hacking concerns. Google's market share is at 5 percent, while Baidu's is 74 percent.'"
With free music downloads and all.
"Google is shutting a Chinese music search service that offered free licensed music downloads because it wasn't popular enough"
They should launch it in Europe or North America then, I don't think they would have that problem here. What's next, will they launch a free Japanese online library in Brazil?
Ezekiel 23:20
Can compete with China
More information here
If we can't be #1, we're going to take our ball and go home...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That's almost 70 million people. And Google can get an average advertising revenue stream of $50/yr per viewer, then that's adding annual sales of $3.5 billion.
That's the "Chinese Math" that venture capitalists every week in pitches from entrepreneurs.
The latest information from statcounter.com has the marketshare breaking down into 73.13% Baidu, 23.24% for Google and the other search engines all under 2%.
Has statcounter.com made a serious blunder with their research, or is cnzz.com (the apparent source of the statistics) a more authoritative source? Since I don't speak Chinese I can't really verify cnzz.com's claims.
Or is the whole premise of this article flawed?
If you refuse to collaborate with repressive and corrupt government, refrain from pushing tax loopholes, lax regulations, and permissive laws, and treat your customers and employees fairly and respectfully, it's going to cost you money, at least in the short term. And your stockholders are only interested in money, and are not great at long-term thinking. Executives who don't maximize profits lose their jobs. So "profits over people" is not so much a sign of corporate depravity as a sign of an absence of corporate free will.
Google can get away with being an exception to this because Google is structured so that Brin, Page, and Schmidt between them have 2/3 of the voting power, even though their equity stake is less than 5%. This allows them to ignore the other stockholders and do things like turn their backs on the largest market on the planet for purely ethical reasons.
I guess this kind of corporate dictatorship is cool when it means that ethics can overcome greed. On the other hand, it also means that Google can't seem to outgrow its backyard hot tub origins.
My parents lived in the UK for 5 years before moving back to China. I have create OpenVPN + Squid proxy combo for them, so they can use normal Internet. In China, you quite often get connection resets while using Google.
But yeh, my family have totally ignored Chinese government's censorship.
The sad reality is that if I want to start a protest about the Internet censorship, I can't. Quite a lot of people believing that censoring information on porn, religous cult, and separatist movement is a good thing. The central government has brainwashed the general populace very well. It has successfully taken the concept of freedom out of most people's soul.
Glad to see a joint project between Chinese govt. and Baidu can be so successful. Maybe the US govt. and GM can get together.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
To hire themselves why give employment to others.
They buy China we could learn a thing or two here.
Google hasn't got a chance against Baidu. In China, the government randomly blocks Google connections, maybe several times per hour. This has nothing to do with content. It is a deliberate ploy to give Baidu an unfair advantage. Remember that Baidu's founder is probably the richest man in China (in terms of legally accumulated wealth that he can actually put his name on).
Numbers don't lie.
Face it, a search engine that has significantly reduced censorship relative to mainstream options is of little interest in China. I expect it would be of little interest here if a search engine with much heavier censorship than Google was mainstream.
What's the deal with these seditious Chinks who dare to rebuff attempts by western entities to exercise control over them?
Washington need to redouble its effort to undermine and subvert these fuckers.
Because we all know democrazy is the best. Just look at our bitches like India.
google stands no chance here as long as they are located in hongkong. it's just painfully slow, so you are forced to use a local site.