Google OneBox music service has no intention to compete with Apple iTunes

On October 28, 2009, Google entered the music industry with the launch of its OneBox music service. Available only in the U.S., the music service is a collaboration between Google, Lala and iLike, two other music websites. The OneBox music service allows people to search and listen to music for free and rent or buy them through several online music stores. The move has been appreciated by the U.S music industry that has been incurring huge losses due to file sharing services like BitTorrent. BBC reports:

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at research firm Forrester, said the service may offer a compelling alternative to illegal file-sharing.

"Apple can do little about iPod owners downloading from BitTorrent," he said in a blog post. "But Google on the other hand can."

BitTorrent software is widely used to trade music and movies.

"Just imagine if when a consumer searches for a song, alongside all of those Torrent results is a heavily integrated Google music offering."

While searching for music in the OneBox music service, user would be able to listen to the songs of their choice through a pop-up widget powere by iLike or Lala. There will also be a MySpace box that would allow people to buy MP3s, music videos.

However, Google already clarified that the company has no intention get into a direct competition with Apple’s iTune or Amazon’s music store. Currently, Apple is dominating the global online music market with 70% of the total music sales.