Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of manfrys

October 29th, 2009 – A week ago, I wrote about some of the possible benefits of Google’s forthcoming (and now released music service). As I was watching Google’s intro video today, something worrying struck me. In the video, you’ll notice that when a band’s name is entered in the search box, Google displays their music service information before regular search results.

What this means is that potential fans that don’t know your website address and are searching for you through Google’s search engine, will not see your website at the top of the page. You may be wondering why this is a big deal since your site (after all your hard search engine optimization work) probably shows up as the top result right under the Google Music Service links.

To understand better, let’s look at some reasons why a person may be searching for you. They just heard a song by you on the radio and want to know more about you. They are already fans but got a song of your stuck in their head so they’re searching for a place to listen to it. They’re longtime fans and want some updates about when your new CD or concert tickets will be released.

If a fan was looking for your music for any of the above reasons, wouldn’t you want them to visit your site so that you would have a say in what they see? A large number of people will automatically click on the first search result, rather than look at the URL and decide if it’s the “official” site or not. Since the Google Music Service shows up first, it intercepts your fans and gets to show Google’s music partners. That means that if you want to be sure that you’re in that loop, you have to sign up for services with Google’s partners. Not that signing up for those services isn’t probably a good idea anyways, but don’t you want the choice?

Here’s another way to think about it. If you decided to sell your music digitally on iTunes or Amazon, would you tell a fan at a concert to visit other websites to buy your newest single, or have them go to your website where you had a link to the buying options? Of course you would tell them to go to your website.

If you send a fan directly to iTunes, then Apple controls the relationship of that potential client. You don’t have access to web analytic metrics of who is visiting your site, you don’t have the option of having fans leave an email address so you can tell them about upcoming concerts or merch that’s for sale, you can’t send them an email about a free track that’s available for download, you don’t have a way to contact that fan again unless they contact you first. Of course, you could have that person sign up for the email list at the concert, but wouldn’t you rather also have the option to sign them up when they visited your website?

With the way Google’s Music Service serves up search results, they may never get to your site. They can listen to music directly from the search results, and from that player, then can find out more information about you. What information will the fan see from there? Whatever Google deems fit from its business relationships.

The way I see this situation being remedied is allowing bands to set up their own profile that Google can pull it’s “official” results from. For example, Google already weights personal name searches that are set up with Google Profile higher than those without.

Am I making a fuss over nothing? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? What’s your take?