I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the companies involved have been willing to comment on it until now.

Here’s how the new feature will work: Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos (the actual content shown will vary depending on the partner — more on that later). Enter a query for “Use Somebody”, and you’re going to see a small ‘play’ button in your search result that lets you stream the Kings of Leon song in its entirety, or buy the song. Clicking on the play button will bring up a small browser window that will immediately start streaming your song. If you enter the name of an artist rather than a song title as your search query, Google will present a handful of popular songs by that artist with multiple ‘play’ buttons.

Here’s what the results page looks like, when multiple songs are being presented:

The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace. In an interesting twist, iLike’s appearance in OneBox will be short-lived — MySpace branded widgets will soon be taking their place. This is an important step in MySpace’s transition to being seen as a media/content hub rather than a pure social network. MySpace is also leveraging some of the new features it has recently rolled out since the iLike acquisition, including its artist dashboard and extensive library of music videos — you’ll be able to jump to a music video for a song directly from MySpace’s Onebox results (this is impressive given that the site only launched those services a week ago).

Likewise, this is also a massive win for Lala. We’ve been big fans of Lala since the site relaunched back in October 2008 with a unique business model that lets users build their music libraries in the cloud for cheap — you can purchase an entire streaming version of an album for around 80 cents, or 10 cents per song. The service’s only problem has been establishing traction, and this will certainly help with that. Expect the service’s userbase to see a big jump as millions of people on Google are exposed to Lala for the first time.

The joint partnership comes with a few quirks. Google will basically be doing a coin toss with each eligible query to determine which service will be serving up the widget. That will help the service distribute load and perhaps leaves the door open for Google to include multiple other music services, but I’m not sure it will provide the best user experience — some users may get confused when a feature in one widget isn’t available in the other.

Google VP of Search Products and User Experience kicked off the event,talking about how Google has expanded its search offerings over time, with Images (2201), Book (2003) and Maps (2007). “Music” is one of Google’s top ten searches of all time, as is “lyrics”. But it hasn’t always been easy to actually find music, which is why Google is looking to offer full song streaming directly from Google.

Google has also partnered with Gracenote to provide full lyric search — if you type in the lyrics from a portion of a song, they’ll identify the song. Song purchasing partners include imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, who will help with music discovery.

Google passed the baton off to MySpace, with MySpace Music President Courtney Holt outlining how much growth MySpace Music has seen and how happy the site is to be working with Google. Ali Partovi, iLike’s former CEO (and MySpace’s current SVP Business Development) took the stage, first taking the time to congratulate MySpace on acquiring iLike. He was joking, but what he says has some truth to it: MySpace made an offer on iLike before iLike could talk about the Google partnership, which iLike had been working on for a long time. In other words, MySpace lucked out with the deal.

Lala’s Bill Nguyen next to the stage, saying that Lala has always been about finding music, and then discovering more that you might like. He says that for the last ten years, music has been about business models, not discovery. Once you wind up on Lala, you can follow other users and see what they’re listening to.

The new feature will be gradually rolling out to users, with a small percentage (1-5%) having access today and rolling out gradually over the next couple days to everyone in the US.

Here’s the Lala player:

Here’s MySpace’s widget (you’ll be seeing an iLike widget temporarily, but eventually they’ll shift over to look like this):

Sony has agreed to acquire Gracenote for about $260M.

Gracenote provides a range of music-related solutions including MusicID, which detects which song is currently being played by an application and loads track information for the user (such as artist and album names). MusicID leverages a database of over 6M CDs and 80M tracks. Its technology has been in development since 1995 (previously under the name CDDB).

Consumer music app services such as Apple iTunes, Yahoo! Music Jukebox, and Winamp use Gracenote for their music detection capabilities.

Gracenote will continue to operate separately from Sony after the deal is closed, which will probably happen in late May. Senior management will stay on.

Although the song was written by the band’s members, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the aforementioned song lyrics were written by some guy outside of the band and sold to them to use on their album. Did you know that whoever wrote the words to that song might be miffed that you found the lyrics on some shabbily built foreign website full of Google Adwords ads? Even though this person already sold the lyrics to Weezer, he doesn’t want you eyeballing what he wrote while some other website makes money from advertisements.

And so begins another era of music industry-related legal issues. The National Music Publishers’ Associating is busy building its army of lawyer robots who, in turn, are busy sending out takedown letters to lyrics websites. If (when) that doesn’t work, they’re ready to start sending similar notices to ISPs and search engines.

I’m not sure when the referencing of song lyrics turned into a commodity that people are willing to pay for but apparently it’s worth about a $100 million each year, according to Gracenote Chief Executive Craig Palmer. Gracenote and Yahoo! teamed up to provide a legal song lyrics service back in April. Song lyrics are returned as non-selectable text — almost like a graphic image, except you can’t save it — and links are provided that allow you to purchase the song (not the lyrics) from Yahoo! Music.

I’m not quite sure how someone can claim copyright to the words of a song after they’ve sold those words to someone else (a band, for instance) but apparently it is possible and it’s going to be the next cool thing to do if you’re part of the music industry.

Lyrics sites out of tune with copyrights [CNET News.com]

There are a lot of startups offering technological means of keeping their noses clean. Most of the solutions function as digital detectives, comparing the video fingerprints of copyrighted content with uploaded content for a match. Some of these companies include Audible Magic, Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharo. YouTube has implemented Audible Magic, although I haven’t noticed a difference. MySpace also incorporated Audible Magic but took the added step of banning re-uploading content violating copyright (“Take Down Stay Down” initiative).

However, while computers are great for solving well defined problems at a dizzying pace, they don’t always do that well when the rules become murkier. Judgments need to be made about whether playing a song or video constitutes “fair use” and simply changing a few characters of the title can fool more basic filters. That’s why 5-year-old BayTSP has decided to keep humans in the loop. The WSJ takes an in depth look at the company.

The Journal reports that BayTSP has hired more than 20 “Video Analysts” to watch videos and report copyrighted content starting at $11 an hour. Their searches are helped by BayTSP’s software, which most likely gives them a head start on what to look for. The company’s most notable client is Viacom, which it supplied with the data for their 100,000 video DMCA takedown request last year. Viacom says it pays BayTSP more than $100,000 each month for the service. The takedown requests have resulted in over 230,000 clips being removed from YouTube for Viacom. BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.

Despite these efforts, video piracy remains rampant both on Google video search and many other social video sites. Once content is taken down, some users simply re-upload them to the site. MySpace is apparently countering this behavior through a file blacklist, but other video providers are certainly concerned with pushing away potentially valuable content and users. Content providers have continually leaned on the heavily manual DMCA safe harbor clause, while copyright holders clamor for embedded filtering. Google has recieved a long list of take down notices. AT&T has expressed an interest in filtering their network directly.

One thing’s for sure, there’s still a lot more debate needed amongst us humans before the computers chime in.

Music-playing cellphones were supposed to have “arrived” by now, but few companies have actually gotten them right so far. (That could be the wireless providers’ fault, though.) So Gracenote, the company that runs the CDDB database that iTunes checks every time you insert an audio CD, has come up with the Mobile Music 2.0 Platform. I know, the name could use some work. MM2 links cellphones, PCs and online music stores in an attempt to streamline the whole process of using a cellphone as a competent music-playing device.

Or, simply, it makes music-playing cellphones better. Well, at least it should.

The PC-to-cellphone part of MM2 lets music aficionados use their PC to look up artist info, get album art, etc. and have all of that content sent to their cellphone. Simple enough, but not exactly something to go wild over.

The other portion of MM2, however, is a little more impressive. Right from compatible cellphones (so far, the Sony Ericsson W910 Walkman and the K850 Cyber-shot), users can look up artist info by supplying a name, some lyrics or a snippet of an actual song. Then you’ll be given the option to buy the song. (Always looking to nickel and dime us…) Gracenote says MM2 has no problem identifying Justin Timberlake songs, but I wonder how well it handles groups like The Knife or DJs like Armand Van Helden.

Gracenote’s history isn’t littered with crappy products or services, so hopefully—hopefully!—MM2 doesn’t outright suck. It at least sounds like it could be good…

Gracenote