GLOBAL - Internet giant Google is entering uncharted waters with its Google Music Service, which will be officially launched on October 28th. The service, which aims at promoting legal downloads of music, combines services of  Myspace, iLike and LaLa, providing a seamless experience for searching and buying music online.

While Google and its partners iLike and LaLa have kept mum on any details on the service ahead of its launch on Wednesday, alleged screenshots of the service have surfaced on the web thereby taking the blogosphore by a storm. The leaked screenshots show media player(s) along with search hits for Irish Rock band U2.

The screenshots were apparently used by Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google for promoting the service among stake holders and potential partners of Google. While the possibility of seeing the same format in Google Music Service cannot be ruled out, it can be seen that the service is ironically similar to the services offered by Amazon's online MP3 store and differs marginally from Apple's iTunes in that the service doesn't require the presence of iTunes (or any) application for using the service. All the services are similar in the fact that all of them provide a 30-second preview of the track for free to let users decide if the the track is worthy of the price tag.

While Google's domination in the search engines segment is unquestionable, it has been losing its market share to Microsoft's Bling and with the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, Bling is getting increased attention from the netizens. Not to be perturbed by the recent developments from its competitors, Google will be entering into Music services segment where it will be competing with services from established players such as Apple (iTunes) and Amazon (MP3 store) along with  Nokia (Nokia Music Store) and Microsoft (Zune Pass). Whether Google's domination in the search segment gives it an unprecedented advantage in the music service will largely depend on its synchronisation with services of its partners iLike and LaLa, along with market acceptance of yet another entré to the already crowded music services segment.