Google silences China music service
The search giant's music download service, exclusive to China users, has been shuttered as its impact was "not as great as expected."
Google has shut its music download service in China as it has not been doing as well as the Web giant wanted it to.
According to Google China's blog post today, the company made the decision because it had to prioritize the development of its products. "The impact of this product is not as great as we expected, so we decided to shift resources to other products," it stated.
Google added that its China-based staff working on the music site will be reassigned to work on other projects so there will be no job cuts. As of now, all its streaming and legal MP3 downloads have been terminated and users will be given until Oct. 19 to export their music playlists as downloadable files.
The China-based music service was launched in March 2009 and survived the fallout between Google and Chinese authorities over the latter's request for the search engine operator to censor search results.
This story originally appeared at ZDNet under the headline "Google shuts China-only music site."