Google launches free music service in China

Google has launched a new music service in China called Music Onebox, in a bid to gain a strong foothold in the world's largest population of internet users as well as counter the huge sway of illegal music that is accessed and downloaded by the Chinese users.This new music service, which allows users to search and download legal music files, free of cost will be a direct challenge to Baidu.com, China's leading search engine firm.

Along with songs, Music Onebox will also allow users to get other information such as  artist names and albums, all of which will be downloaded from www.top100.cn, a Chinese music website co-founded by basketball star Yao Ming.

Based in Beijing, the Top100 service has already gathered content licensing agreements from around 100 record labels. If successful, Music Onebox will show the way to legally monetise digital music in China for global music labels including Universal Music and EMI, which have artists who are popular in China.

According to Google, "this legal music service will help users avoid dead links, slow downloads, inaccurate search results, and poor quality or incomplete songs."