Admitting defeat in the nation, Google has shut down its China-only music download service.
Dubbed "Google Music Search," the service will go dark on October 19th.
Google confirmed the service had performed poorly: "The influence of this product turned out to be lower than we expected, and as a result we decided to transfer our resources to other products instead. The move is part of an ongoing effort across Google to bring greater focus to our portfolio of products."
The search giant had launched the service in 2009 and it offers free, licensed digital copies of music. Google had agreements with Warner Music and EMI and the labels and Google would share revenue from banner ads.
Apparently, Chinese users did not care for legal copies of music they can easily find on rival search engine Baidu, which controls 80 percent of the search market two years after Google decided to fight the Chinese government over censorship and move its servers to Hong Kong.
Google confirmed the service had performed poorly: "The influence of this product turned out to be lower than we expected, and as a result we decided to transfer our resources to other products instead. The move is part of an ongoing effort across Google to bring greater focus to our portfolio of products."
The search giant had launched the service in 2009 and it offers free, licensed digital copies of music. Google had agreements with Warner Music and EMI and the labels and Google would share revenue from banner ads.
Apparently, Chinese users did not care for legal copies of music they can easily find on rival search engine Baidu, which controls 80 percent of the search market two years after Google decided to fight the Chinese government over censorship and move its servers to Hong Kong.
