This morning the rumor mill churned as the New York Post broke the news that Google may be buying Napster (a rumor which Google has since denied). The idea of Google setting up a music store doesn’t surprise me, as the search giant recently launched a video store, which I’ve been keeping track of, and expanded its music search offering. What can Hitwise tell us about search and music, and if Google should invest in a music service?
According to Hitwise clickstream data, Google sends a more of its traffic to the Music category than the other leading search engines, as shown on the chart below. For the week ending 1/28/06, 2.38% of visits leaving Google went to sites within the Music category, compared to 2.04% for Yahoo! Search, 1.91% for Ask Jeeves, and 1.30% for MSN Search. Combine Google’s dominance in sending visits to music sites with its 62% share of search volume, and you can see that Google has a very strong case for building its own music service.

But the question remains, would a Google/Napster service be compatible with the iPod? According to the latest reports, Apple sold 14 million iPods in the last quarter of 2005, and over 42 million to date. That’s a significant chunk of people who are unlikely to use a new music service if they can’t easily get the music onto their iPods. Search term data show that iPod has a stronghold on consumer interest: during the 2005 holiday period, searches for ‘ipod’ outnumbered searches for ‘mp3 players’ by 3 to 1. iTunes is still the leading music download site, in terms of visits and searches, and while Napster and Rhapsody are popular, their share of searches has not increased significantly in the past 6 months, as shown on the chart below. During the post-holiday music downloading frenzy, Apple’s iTunes site (not use of the service) received more than double the visits to any other music download site. A Google music store would certainly have a significant number of customers, but if iPod owners are unable to use it, Google could have an uphill battle.