Tim Yang’s Weblog

Nearly two years ago, Google China started a legal music download site to compete with Baidu’s version. The courts sided with Baidu in the lawsuit by the music industry to stop them. So they made an agreement with Google to give them license to give their users (only in China) free downloads to the latest hits.

I started using it yesterday. They don’t have the absolute latest releases, for instance I couldn’t find Taylor Swift’s “Mine” even though the single was released over two months ago.

But they have a very wide selection. And not just Chinese language hits. I managed to download several pieces from Tiesto and Lady Gaga, after just navigating through a simple CAPTCHA puzzle.

The quality is really good. For Lady Gaga’s “Romance”, the size of the file was over 11MB. There was no audible watermarking and it was a normal mp3, playable even after copying to another PC.

I’m not sure what the revenue stream is, but the users in China are getting a really good deal. And it’s legal with the permission of the record companies too.

Google China at http://google.cn is still a flat page with a link to http://google.com.hk.

But since I typically use http://google.com, I found that THAT website is accessible. I can do searches using it.

However http://webcache.googleusercontent.com (ie Google cache) is of course not accessible.

It’s a very strange setup. Do China users know that they can use the original Google.com as normal and that the hullabaloo with Google in China was all just public relations?

Update: On Google Chrome, all searches using http://google.com are redirected to http://google.com.hk, but not when using other browsers like Firefox.