Google is pumping out a slew of new music-related features, including music discovery site Music Magnifier, a new YouTube Music page with recommendations and genre guides, and rich snippets for webmasters to mark up their pages for musical content.
Google’s definitely getting more musical these days – although, unfortunately, not in the “West Side Story” sort of sense. Rather, the company is expanding its music-related features dramatically. This seems to made possible at least in part due to recent licensing arrangements.
Google has unveiled a slew of new music-related features, including Music Magnifier, a new YouTube Music page, and rich snippets for music.
Music Magnifier is a side-service for Google Music (Beta) users who want to find new musicians and for those artists to promote themselves. The service is described as ” a new music discovery site that will keep your collection growing,” and features artist showcases, free music (including the free song of the day and a free song archive), and videos of live performances.
Those looking for video content would also be wise to check out the recently announced YouTube music page. While YouTube has had musical elements for a long time, this new rendition gives an updated layout, a rolling “Top 100” song list, information on local shows, and recommended videos based on what you’ve already seen and liked.
As part of the launch of this new page, YouTube also brought in several famous artists to put together “genre guides” – including David Guetta’s Guide to Electronica, Lady Gaga’s Guide to Pop, and Eminem & Royce Da 5’9″’s Guide to Hiphop.
Google has added rich snippets that allows webmasters to mark up their pages for musical content. Once marked up, the sites may show the track name, artist name, and song length. This markup is common between Google and Schema.org.
All of this talk of a more audiophilic Google is making me want to start a new project. What do you think? Should I write “Google: The Musical“ – featuring such numbers as “Don’t Be Evil,” “Adult Supervision,” and “Why Do You Antitrust Me?” Comment and tweet to let me know.