Hot Rumor: Google is Launching a New Music Service

Hot Rumor: Google is Launching a New Music Service

According to a blog post by Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Experian Hitwise, Google is expected to launch their music service today. So, she took a closer look at the tons of data that Hitwise collects to see can be seen.

Here are some highlights:

– Out of the top 1,000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6 percent were music-related (which includes bands, music services and content).
— Last week, Google sent 1.48 percent of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits, 95 percent of the downstream traffic to Music websites were returning visitors (that had visited Google in the past 30 days).
— Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30 percent of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.
— Last week, 15 percent of the clicks from the search term portfolio of Music that includes the names of over 900 band and artist names resulted in a visit to a Google property, especially YouTube, among the Top 10 websites to receive traffic.
— Last month, 71% of all searches took place on Google.

Speaking of music, VEVO, a music and video entertainment hub being launched by YouTube and Universal Music Group later this year, just landed AT&T as an advertiser. Oh, and VEVO just got an undisclosed investment from Abu Dhabi Media Company, which is backed by the people from the United Arab Emirates.

Is there a connection? Is YouTube an independent subsidiary of Google? You betcha.

I spoke with Bill Tancer, General Manager of Hitwise, and author of the best-selling book “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why it Matters” at SES Chicago 2008. He was about to spot search engine user behavior patterns and the shopping patterns of the affluent long before they were common knowledge.

Bill Tancer on Search Patterns at SES Chicago 2008

So, when the folks over at Hitwise tell me how music plays on Google, I listen. I listen very closely. They hear things before the rest of us.