Google India shuts down its music search service

Google India seems to have shut down its online music search service, Google Music India (not Google Music) as the search now redirects uses to Google India.

Google Music India, launched in October 2010, allowed users to search for songs by artist, movie, album or song title and listen to the song online from the partner's site.

It also allowed users to play music online via partners like record label Saregama, Web18's In.com and Saavn.

While Google India did not give reasons for the shut-down, it may be noted that Google Music India was a 'labs' product or experimental products that are not guaranteed to be part of Google.com. 

According to Google, lab products are essentially "for more adventurous users to play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them."

The service since its launch in October 2010 has been offering a lot of legal online services for music.

''We are always trying out new products and formats to improve the experience for our users. Given that we have a lot of legal music options for users now (raaga, gaana, in.com, saavn, dhingana, youtube etc) being featured on search, we felt we did not need a dedicated product for the purpose,'' Medianama quoted Google India as saying.

Google Music India is the third music service to shut down in the past one year after Rediff shut down its online music service Songbuzz in December 2012 three years after it began in November 2009 and Guruji, which offered a similar music search service like Google Music India, shut down in March 2011.

Interestingly, e-commerce major Flipkart had also surprisingly shutdown its digital music store Flyte Music last month, just a year and half after it began in February 2012.