Rumor has it that a new Google Music service will launch today, and the excitement is almost palpable as the announcement window provided by normal business hours narrows. Or not. Anyway, Hitwise took a look at Google’s relationship with music sites.
As you might expect, Google’s a significant provider of traffic to music sites. Heather Dougherty wrote, “Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.”
If Google tries to take away what it’s given, things could get interesting, then. A number of sites stand to lose a lot of traffic, chief among them Wikipedia, Yahoo Music, and MySpace. Facebook and MTV Music make Hitwise’s top ten list, too.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, Google’s music service may not mean a ton to the search giant. Dougherty found, “Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits,” so it’s not like half or more of Google users are dying to hear more about bands.
We’ll see what happens if/when the launch occurs.
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