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.'"

Comments

China seems like a nice place to live

[O3993]

With free music downloads and all.

Re:China seems like a nice place to live

[gshegosh]

Yeah, who needs clean air and water or basic freedoms when one can download music for free.

Re:China seems like a nice place to live

[Sir_Sri]

With enough money you can buy your way to freedom somewhere on earth. We're all stuck breathing air, and pollution ends up everywhere in varying concentrations.

What?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"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?

Re:Wah!

[firex726]

If it's losing them money and they are losing market share, why not?
It was a gimmick to gain market share, it failed, so why keep doing it?

This is why Corporations Do Evil Things

[fm6]

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.

Re:This is why Corporations Do Evil Things

[Grishnakh]

Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop. Companies don't need to grow. They need to grow to a comfortable size, and then when they're at an efficient size for whatever they're doing, they should be able to just maintain that size, provide good products and services and provide good employment for their employees and be profitable, and that should be good enough, without a bunch of morons whining about how they're not growing any more and this makes them "stagnant".

Re:This is why Corporations Do Evil Things

[fm6]

I was referring to their decision to shut down their Chinese search engine two years ago. If they had kept it open (which would have meant complying with government policies on censorship and user privacy) they would certainly be one of the biggest search providers in China, and their other Chinese businesses would have done much better.