Google launched an online music service in China yesterday, in an attempt to grab a greater share of online searches in the world’s biggest internet market.

The world's four biggest record labels – Warner Music, Universal, EMO and Sony BMG – have all signed up to the service, which will be free to Chinese users, but will not be available elsewhere.

Google is aiming to take on local search engine competitors such as Baidu, which have the dominant share of search revenue in China. Baidu, and other search engines, have grown rapidly on the back of specialised pages that help users to find and download unlicensed music.

Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, said that music downloads were "the key missing piece" to Google's service in China, and claimed that a lack of music search was the most common reason that Chinese users gave for preferring other search sites. Google will team up with Top100.cn, a popular Chinese site, to provide the new service.

The service is supported by 140 record labels, including the big four, and will earn revenue from advertising on pages that let Chinese web users download or stream licensed music – 350,000 tracks are already available, with plans to have more than a million tracks within a few months. Warner Music said that it would make its entire global catalogue available as part of the deal.

The move is being welcomed by the music industry as an attempt to take on online piracy, which is rife in China.

Web users outside China have alternatives when it comes to listening to licensed music. Spotify, the music streaming service, has 4 million tracks and is expanding rapidly, adding around 10,000 tracks a day. Spotify’s catalogue is fast approaching the size of Apple’s iTunes, which has approximately 10 million tracks available to buy and download.

Last year Google increased its share of the China search engine market from 23 per cent to 28 per cent, according to research firm Analysys International. Baidu remains the dominant player, with a 62 per cent share, up from 59 per cent in 2007. China has an online population of is 298 million.

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