Google Abandons Music Search in India

In October 2010, Google launched a music portal in India to help people find “legal” songs from Bollywood films and music albums. Google partnered with three music companies – Saavn, Saregama and In.com – for the content and itself played the role of an aggregator.

The music service is still available at google.co.in/music but it looks like Google has more or less abandoned the project.

The homepage of the Google India Music website hasn’t been updated for a long time now and a quick search reveals that none of the newer Hindi films – like Kahaaani or Agent Vinod – are available in Google Music though they are very much part of the online catalog of Saavn and In.com.

Another time-sorted Google search suggests that just one music album has been added to Google’s Music catalog this year.

Google has a revenue sharing arrangement with partners – the music player window shows regular AdSense ads  – and the initial plan was to integrate music into their main search results. That never happened or maybe the advertising revenue wasn’t convincing enough for partners.