Google shuts down its free music service in China

Google has shut down its Chinese music search service that offered free licensed music downloads because it wasn't popular enough, the company has said.

The China-only music search service closes a little over two years after the company closed its search engine in the Chinese mainland, and follows a continual slide of popularity in China with Google losing ground to local search providers.

As of Sunday, visitors to the site see only a message saying, "the service has been shut down, and users are reminded to log in, download and save the playlist before October 19."

Google launched the music search service in March 2009 working with Chinese music website top100.cn to provide free and legal music in China.

"The popularity of this product turned out to be lower than we expected, therefore we decided to transfer resources to other products," Boon-Lock Yeo, head of Google's engineering and research teams in China, announced on Google's company blog Friday.

tvnewswatch, London, UK