Today at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer-focused conference in San Francisco, Google announced its new cloud music service, which is called Music Beta. The service is currently in private mode, and is invite only, but that will likely change very soon.
The owner of MusicBeta.com is “Oversee Domain Management, LLC”, a company operated by domain industry conglomerate, Oversee.net. It appears that the company has owned this domain name since at least 2007, according to the Whois history tool.
Assuming Google wants the domain name, negotiations could get pretty interesting. I believe Oversee’s domain parking provider, Domain Sponsor, uses a Google feed that likely produces tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue for both companies and partners. When you have such an important relationship, these types of negotiations can be tricky.
Oversee would seem to be in a very good position here, since the domain name is descriptive in nature and they’ve owned it well before Google chose the brand name for its new service. As such, Oversee should be able to continue monetizing the domain name with targeted, music-related pay per click links. However, Google does seemingly control the revenue the parked name will earn 🙂
I have a feeling Music Beta is going to be big, and Google is going to feel the need to acquire the domain name due to the volume of direct navigation traffic. It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
odd naming choice – in the context of music beta, i would associate “beta” w/ “test” (ie, not production/live mode).
@ Michael
I agree with you. I bet we’ll start seeing some companies copy this naming convention though.
This is going to be a very cool service. Now what are your thoughts on Oversee.net “unparking” the domain name so that Google will not have any visibility into the direct navigation traffic stats? As a parked domain using Google’s ad feed I believe Google will know, or can easily determine the amount of traffic the domains gets as direct navigation. As a potential seller would you want your potential buyer to have access to this information, or would you want to keep it private?
CHA-CHING!!
this is what every domainer wants, to own a .com domain that some big company later decides to turn into a mega brand!
This time Oversee got lucky, who’s next?
Question: are you sure that the official name is Music “Beta” ?? or is it entirely possible that “Beta” is temporary while the product is new and being introduced/tested/rolled out ? The actual URL of the service seems to just be “music.google.com” …. nothing about “Beta”. If it is “Beta” then they may have hit the jackpot, but I can very easily see this being a temporary move until it’s called “Google Music,” like every other Google product (Google Apps, Google Analytics, Google this Google that, etc)
What do you think ?
I wouldn’t bet my apartment on it, but you can do a Google search and see how many results there are.
Is this another domain snapped by halvarez? 😀