EdwardKhoo.com

In an effort to fight against music piracy in China, Google has teamed up with top100.cn (co-founded by basketball superstar Yao Ming) to provide legal & free Chinese mp3 songs download for China internet users.

The site is easy to navigate & users get to choose the songs they want to download by browsing through the billboard and singers database. Users get to listen to the song first before they decide whether to download it or not. Collaborating with Sony Music, EMI, Warner Music and Universal Music, this new music search engine will direct users to the search results on the site, which initially offers 350,000 downloads for free.

Perhaps one of the reason Google launched the service is to capitalize on the big consumer market of China, as quoted in Guardian :

China accounted for less than 1% of the world’s legal music download market last year at just $76m, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and some Chinese pop stars have abandoned reliance on music sales to focus on charging for personal appearances and live shows.

China has overtaken the US to account for the world’s largest single internet population, though only a small minority – around 15% – of the country has web access, an enormous potential for market growth.

Despite the obvious commercial opportunities, western web companies have struggled to gain a foothold in the market above domestic sites.

This service is currently available for China users only, foreign users may have to wait before Google expand the service to Chinese users from other countries.