Check it out. I wonder if this will do anything for the local indie band.

From Wired -

Google Wednesday announced a widely anticipated addition to its popular search engine that reduces the number of steps one has to take between hearing about a piece of music and actually hearing it, thanks to partnerships with a bevy of music services: imeem, Lala, MySpace’s recently-acquired iLike, Pandora and Rhapsody.

Search for any artist, album or song in the regular Google search box, and Google’s new “OneBox” music search feature — rolling out to U.S. users starting now — displays a box of playable search results, so you can hear what something sounds like with one click of the play button.

A Google algorithm randomly decides whether your playable search results come from Lala or MySpace. Both services will let users hear the entire track once for free. If you search for the same track again, the search box will play a 30-second sample instead. Lala has offered this feature for awhile on partner sites like Billboard and Pitchfork, but it represents a new strategy for iLike, which MySpace acquired in August. The site previously allowed only 30-second samples for free in most cases. As such, a Google spokesman tells us, “[full-track] coverage may vary at first, but that’s the goal we’ll be working toward.”

No money changes hands between Google and its partners as part of this deal; it’s a straight trade between the services, which want traffic, and Google, which wants to make its search function more useful to music fans.

In the grand context of sweeping changes the digital music revolution has wrought on our culture in general, the primary effect of this announcement is that average web users will be able to hear full tracks, for free, a mere click after entering the name of an artist album or song on Google.

Read the rest of the Wired article here.