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Google music store on the way?

Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
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Declan McCullagh
2 min read

There are some new hints that a Google music store, which could compete with Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and other download services, is on the way.

The most recent evidence is adding "/music" to google.com's robots.txt file, meaning that such a subdirectory is expected to be created any time.

We also noticed this odd behavior earlier today. No "google.com/music" Web site exists on the public Internet. But searching Google's index for "google.com/music" yields a different result than the standard "Sorry, no information is available for the URL" error message.

This follows a report by Garret Rogers at our ZDNET sister site saying the final name will not be "Google Music" but perhaps something like GMusic.

What else? The company announced last week that a new Pearl Jam video would be available for free on Google Video -- making the company's lack of ability to make money off of downloads of the band's music unusually obvious.

Forbes.com wrote last month that Google "met with a group of music industry executives" and an analyst says it'll launch a music store soon. The Financial Times has also reported that "Amazon and Google are separately in talks with music industry executives about new digital music services that could break Apple's grip on the fast-growing market for legal downloads."

Google also has posted ads with job openings at a "Google Audio" in New York. One, for an account executive, says he or she will have to "sell network, national agency accounts, transactional advertising solutions, and client direct accounts, including custom built advertising solutions." (Though to be fair, that description sounds more like audio advertising than a music store.)

Of course, if and when any "Gtunes" store launches, one big question will be whether it will use some kind of digital rights management or not. A DRM-embracing Google stands a good chance of alienating the free-software crowd -- and anyone who wants to use Gtunes-purchased music on their iPod. (The only DRM variant compatible with the iPod is Apple's owned by Google but is currently blank -- at least for now.