• CNet, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 11:15 AM

Google is increasingly moving into digital music, CNet's Greg Sandoval reports. On the one hand, YouTube, the search giant's video service, is in talks to renegotiate music licensing deals with three of the four major record labels. On the other, partner Amazon.com, which provides a music store through Google's Android mobile operating system, is turning over big music sales. Google declined to comment on just how big those sales are, but sources tell Sandoval that the music labels are "very happy" with the Google's mobile arrangement with Amazon.

The CNet writer also suggests that Google could one day tap into the huge digital music market by providing a searchable music store of its own. "Incredibly," Sandoval says, "Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a lifelong technologist, could find himself becoming an accidental music industry titan, a sort of digital-age David Geffen or Ahmet Etegun."

Even if this were Schmidt's ambition, Google is still a long way from producing the kind of music revenues that would lump it in the same category as Apple's iTunes. That said, it didn't take Apple long to corner the digital music market (about five years), but Google doesn't have even have the licensing rights to the music catalogs of all four record label majors. Recently, YouTube and Warner Music Group failed to reach a licensing agreement and Warner's content was subsequently removed from the video site.

Read the whole story at CNet »