Google's New Music Service

I just returned from a presentation at Capitol Records Studio A announcing the new Google music service with partnerships with MySpace/iLike, Lala, imeem, Rhapsody and Pandora. This is the same room that in the past couple of weeks I had seen Sir George Martin working on reissues and a tribute to my friend Greg Ladanyi where Jackson Browne, Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, members of Toto and others perform Warren Zevon (Greg produced Warren's early records) songs as well as their own in Greg's honor. But today the stage was theirs, trying to make claim how they are the future of music. They basically have two assumptions; that by being at the top of the Google search for music and offering the streaming of the tracks from these legit services that it will convert to increased sales and that this will serve as a music discovery mechanism. In regards to the first assumption, it will still be difficult to compete with free but it will increase their streaming costs, a question they avoided from the audience asking if Google was helping offset. In regards to the second, they still have not proven to be the starting point for the discovery of a large amount of artists even though all these services have been around for years. I remain optimistic that we will find an answer yet skeptical that this is it. Anyway, isn't this what Yahoo has been doing for some time now?