Google Stops Offering Free Music Service In China 67
SquarePixel writes "Google has yanked its free music service in China after being unable to make it popular enough. The service offered Chinese people free licensed music downloads and was launched in 2009 to compete with the rival search engine Baidu. 'Once China's second largest search provider, Google has now fallen to fourth place, overtaken by other local companies. — Google's popularity in the country has waned ever since 2010, when the company pulled the plug on its China-based search engine following disputes with the government over censorship and hacking concerns. Google's market share is at 5 percent, while Baidu's is 74 percent.'"
China seems like a nice place to live (Score:3, Funny)
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Awww. You think you have clean air and basic freedoms. That's cute.
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Aww, look at the adorable AC (two, one, we're not sure). making comments.
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Aww, look are the supercilious pseudonymous user attempting to patronize AC's. That's precious.
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What's cute is that you seem to have assumed something about where "gshegosh" lives.
Perhaps, but "planet earth" seems like a safe bet. The belief that nowhere on earth offers 'basic freedoms' is a reasonable one (based on certain political and ethical judgments, sure, but not wildly outlandish ones), questioning the 'cleanness' of air perhaps goes a little further but I think you'll find plenty of people that will consider the atmosphere of the planet as a whole to be 'polluted'.
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With enough money you can buy your way to freedom somewhere on earth. We're all stuck breathing air, and pollution ends up everywhere in varying concentrations.
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I disagree; I'm sure there's some places where there's lots of real freedom and clean air. The south pole comes to mind....
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Why is it reasonable? Got any proof?
I could choose what I did with my life, what I studied, where I live, where and how I work. I can speak freely and am mostly free to do what I please as long as I do not disturb other people's freedom. That's "basic freedoms" if you ask me. If you think that we're all slaves because corporations and corrupt governments rule and we have mortgages or are married or whatever -- that's your opinion. D
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"You're not perfect" is the tried-and-true retort of the miserable.
Say this, or anything like it, and you shut down criticism along with any desire for self-reflection.
Enjoy your brief moment of one-upmanship, because ultimately it's not he who loses, but you.
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Yeah, being able to comment about my freedom (or lack of it) without risking death penalty makes living where I live a little bit better than in China. And, water here is still blue and air is transparent. Not like on pictures I've seen from China, but of course they were photoshopped.
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Yeah, who needs ... basic freedoms when one can download music for free.
+1
Here in America you are totally free to get on the TSA no-fly list by exercising your freedom of speech.
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Citation requested.
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What? (Score:4, Funny)
"Google is shutting a Chinese music search service that offered free licensed music downloads because it wasn't popular enough"
They should launch it in Europe or North America then, I don't think they would have that problem here. What's next, will they launch a free Japanese online library in Brazil?
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Pretty much yep... They did it as a gimmick to attract people.
They already have the market share in NA/Eu so no need for that same deal.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilian [wikipedia.org]
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No one (Score:2)
Wah! (Score:2)
If we can't be #1, we're going to take our ball and go home...
Re:Wah! (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's losing them money and they are losing market share, why not?
It was a gimmick to gain market share, it failed, so why keep doing it?
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Why keep it going? Because I live in China and I like it.
Actually no, I always use Baidu.com to download my music. Google flopped because it just doesn't provide what Chinese people want. It keeps thinking that providing American preferences to Chinese people will be successful. Baidu's search and other services like music are way behind Google's but Baidu understands the Chinese marketplace and provides services tailored to match.
5 percent of the Chinese population (Score:1)
That's almost 70 million people. And Google can get an average advertising revenue stream of $50/yr per viewer, then that's adding annual sales of $3.5 billion.
That's the "Chinese Math" that venture capitalists every week in pitches from entrepreneurs.
This is why Corporations Do Evil Things (Score:5, Interesting)
If you refuse to collaborate with repressive and corrupt government, refrain from pushing tax loopholes, lax regulations, and permissive laws, and treat your customers and employees fairly and respectfully, it's going to cost you money, at least in the short term. And your stockholders are only interested in money, and are not great at long-term thinking. Executives who don't maximize profits lose their jobs. So "profits over people" is not so much a sign of corporate depravity as a sign of an absence of corporate free will.
Google can get away with being an exception to this because Google is structured so that Brin, Page, and Schmidt between them have 2/3 of the voting power, even though their equity stake is less than 5%. This allows them to ignore the other stockholders and do things like turn their backs on the largest market on the planet for purely ethical reasons.
I guess this kind of corporate dictatorship is cool when it means that ethics can overcome greed. On the other hand, it also means that Google can't seem to outgrow its backyard hot tub origins [cnn.com].
Re:This is why Corporations Do Evil Things (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop. Companies don't need to grow. They need to grow to a comfortable size, and then when they're at an efficient size for whatever they're doing, they should be able to just maintain that size, provide good products and services and provide good employment for their employees and be profitable, and that should be good enough, without a bunch of morons whining about how they're not growing any more and this makes them "stagnant".
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Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop.
I was talking about their ability to act like a mature software company, not get bigger. They're certain good at that They've grown at least 20% every year since they were founded, often much more. The software side as at 34,000 employees, and was growing at about 1,000 a year before they bought Motorola and added 20,000 employees in one fell swoop.
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Because time and time again, the companies that stop growing start dying... there are precious few that can just continue to do what they do forever on, and there are probably none in the fast-changing tech world.
If you aren't growing, it means you're not doing new things that people want, and in the world where hundreds of other companies are trying n
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I was referring to their decision to shut down their Chinese search engine two years ago. If they had kept it open (which would have meant complying with government policies on censorship and user privacy) they would certainly be one of the biggest search providers in China, and their other Chinese businesses would have done much better.
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You can be good, but if you aren't profitable some other company will push you out, and t he only ones remaining will be evil companies.
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When you spin complicated (and in this case, logically inconsistent) theories, you might want to test them against the real world.
You can be profitable without maximizing profit, and that's precisely what Google does. They make so much money from their few businesses that make money, they can have a lot of other business that are unprofitable, and even turn their back on major markets (China! One third of the human race!) and still have a bottom line ($8 billion in profit last year) that boggles the mind.
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yet Google bows down the the wishes of the French gov and censors searches for Nazi paraphernalia in France. And thats just one example i can use, im sure there is many more. Why the double standard?
Because blocking nutjobs (and some serious collectors) from buying Nazi underpants is probably not perceived as being the loss of a serious human right. Personally though I'd disagree. The best test of freedom of speech and expression is in how it treats people with unpleasant/unpopular views. While I'd say it should be completely legal for some some angry twat to walk the streets dressed as Colonel Klink, the history associated with Nazi imagery means that there should be a far lower bar when determining t
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Ah, another silly libertarian. All public entities are bad, all private ones are good. By that logic, the ideal society is run by the Mafia.
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A corporation's goal is to make money. In a free market they can only get money by making products or producing services that people want. A government's goal is control. Since the end of the gold standard, the government doesn't even have to make money, it can just print it and dev
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Well, if you only look at the things that governments do that you don't like (make you pay taxes) and only look at the stuff private business does that you do like (sells you stuff you want), then yeah, government is absolutely evil and businesses are absolutely good.
But in the real world, governments do good things and businesses do bad things. Look at the history of slavery.
Another little point: what do you suppose happens to private entities when there's no government to restrict their power? The become
Personal Internet (Score:1)
My parents lived in the UK for 5 years before moving back to China. I have create OpenVPN + Squid proxy combo for them, so they can use normal Internet. In China, you quite often get connection resets while using Google.
But yeh, my family have totally ignored Chinese government's censorship.
The sad reality is that if I want to start a protest about the Internet censorship, I can't. Quite a lot of people believing that censoring information on porn, religous cult, and separatist movement is a good thing. The
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It has successfully taken the concept of freedom out of most people's soul.
The Americans have Hollywood and over 500 channels to do the very same thing. It really is torture with the soft pillows.
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It's not 'justifying' anything. It's a reminder that we all need to clean house, especially those who go around saying we're not as bad as the other guy.
Cooperation between government and industry (Score:2)