damnResistance.com

You may remember the days when artist only released their new albums through Target or Walmart? Yeh, that still happens (i.e. Pearl Jam). But welcome to the future of the mp3 release - full streaming for free from Google. The power of the biggest search engine in the world is being harnessed to take on iTunes. It was only time before iTunes met its match. Can Google pull it off? Lets look at the following case study: new rising star and friend to my partner company Twin Bear Management - Gareth Asher.

42% of Gareth Asher’s hits on his website come through Google. Meaning that if you are a new fan, desperately trying to track down the good-lookin’ crooner you caught at the VooDoo Fest this fall, you are going to your google search bar first.

So what does this mean? As of last weekend, your first interaction with the Gareth Asher experience looks something like this (see image below).

Read this from Epoch Times:

“Onebox relies on two music services, Lala and iLike (iLike was recently acquired by MySpace) to provide a content.

Lala is a popular music website with a database of 7 million songs. Lala users can buy streaming versions of songs for 10 cents a piece. The music site iLike is a destination for sharing music recommendations and playlists, while its music application is wide-spread on social sites like Facebook or Bebo.

Gracenote, another partner for Google’s Music Onebox, helps identify songs using searches related to lyrics in the song.

The new music search feature should also help with music discovery by linking to sites such as Pandora, imeem or Rhapsody.

Google Music Onebox provides functionality that its largest Internet rival, Yahoo, has been offering for some time now. But the real target of Google’s product could be iTunes, Apple’s online store for buying music. Currently, music from Google’s Onebox music service can be purchased through MySpace or Lala, but industry analysts predict that in the future, Google might offer its own store.”

So if you are Gareth Asher, what does this mean for you? It means you have the most powerful tool on the internet streaming your music online for free. So get out there, play your ass off and give people a reason to google you.