Google Music: music recognition, music tagging and Youtube Integration

In order to beat AmazonMP3 and iTunes Google Music has to be 10x better. To reach that level they must integrate the music features of Search, Play, Shopper and Youtube. Starting with the integration of their music recognition technology across their services, having cross links from Youtube to Play and leveraging their cloud to help folks build Youtube Music Video playlists and  track wishlists.

While Google has music recognition tools built into several of their services not all of the services use the recognition function as one would expect, not all of the examples of its utilization are implemented in a manner that necessarily takes full advantage of the Google Plus “Social Spine”, nor does it have a music search history of a user’s music recognition activities. The most prominent examples of Google’s use of music recognition is in Youtube’s video upload feature, in the Google Music web app that creates an “instant mix”. There is also a music recognition widget in the Jelly Bean called “What’s that Song?”.

When Uploading a video Youtube will detect the music that you have laid over the video and oftentimes recommend its own higher quality version. This means that Google could offer sales in the Google Play store of that music found in Youtube videos by giving a direct link to the purchase on the same page as the video. Think “Like this song? Click here to buy it on Google Play!”. Furthermore, if a user does not feel that it is time to purchase the track, they should be able to “tag” it for purchase later from Youtube into a tagged music list that holds tags from all of Google’s music services.

Google Music (My Google Play Music), Google’s cloud based Music locker, has what Google calls an “instant mix” feature. Select “crete mix” from any given track’s context menu in your music list. It then builds a twenty five track mix of similar tracks from your uploaded and purchased music. Presumably it does this using music recognition software. If this is true one would expect it to be capable of providing the tracks metadata (Album, album cover, year, track number, artist, and label), however, the “Edit Track Information” option from the track and album context menus do not possess a “get album/track information from internet” option. Furthermore, since it is obvious that both Youtube and Google Music locker have music recognition functionality why can’t Youtube build an instant mix of similar music videos for the user based on a selection of videos that users have identified like My Google Play Music creates the instant mix from a selected track? Along the same line of thought, Google Music also offers the ability to share a Youtube video of a track from your music locker. It gives a web-app menu that displays Youtube search results for potentially similar songs. However, this feature also does not use the Music recognition technology that is in both services. It searches Youtube with the track’s current Metadata, meaning that if your song's title is listed, in your Google Music locker, as unknown, then it searches Youtube Music for “Unknown”...fail.

The new version of Android, 4.1 Jelly Bean, has an associated widget called “What’s that Song?”. This widget can be used to identify songs that are apart of the ambient noise in the presence of the phone or tablet. Despite the fact that this is a neat widget, it's not ten times better than the two previous standard apps used for this. Soundhound and Shazam both recognize music at least as good as Google’s new widget but, they both offer the ability to tag music for purchase later and share them through a variety of methods including email and social media directly from the app. The Play store has a native option to share the media once you arrive at it but its not native in the interface of the widget. Its sounds shallow, but its too many clicks to get to the share option...it and a tagging function have to be right next to the result.

Music results in Google Search come back in an awkward fashion. Youtube on top (this works and makes sense from a business perspective), then Wikipedia, then lyrics listings, and then web radio sites. So, some of you might recall that there was the coolest feature ever several years back in Google Search...Google Music Search, it gave users music results from across the web including MySpace, Lala and Amazon with the ability to stream samples in most cases and sometimes full versions right from the results page. One day, unannounced and without ceremony, Google Music Search was shot in the head and buried under the toilet in building 8 at the Mountain View campus. It strikes me as odd that results from the Google Play Music store are not included in the Google Search results for a [Van Halen Jump] search. Google owns an online music store called Google Play Music, wouldn’t Google Search results with links to listen to samples kinda make sense from a business perspective, and be a really intuitive feature for users?

The real shortcoming of Google’s Music services right now, in my opinion, is the lack of a native track tagging feature and a auto-update metadata feature. Both of which are functions that are obvious extensions of Google’s current capabilities. How that tagging function could hypothetically work could be presented in multiple ways. It could be linked to the Google Bookmarks service (take note that I am not talking about Chrome bookmarks Sync here), it could be a wish list or shopping list found in Google Shopping Lists or Google Play, and it could be a samples playlist built into Google Music basing the functionality on the samples from Google Books but using Youtube’s Licensing to provide the samples. Finally, returning to the now defunct Google Music Search. Google knows a lot of stuff and now regularly presents that knowledge to searchers at the top of the results in black unlinked text. I am not making a judgment about how easy this would be but, in order to be 10x better than the two current online champions, iTunes and AmazonMP3, Google Music needs to offer features like song lyrics as known information at the top of the results for songs and as a visualization in both the Android app and the web app.

Google has a lot of cool features for music purchasing and discovery throughout its varied services, but in their current format Google does not beat AmazonMP3 and iTunes. Each day that goes by that these features continue to not synergize, the distance that Google has to cover, to catch up, increases. In order to cause people to switch from their old service Google’s music services and features need to be 10x better. If they can synchronize the efforts of Search, Youtube, Play and Shopper in an intuitive manner they might have the critical mass they need to start winning...assuming of course that they get more music in the Play store...which is another problem entirely, for another post.