Seems wrong that GoogleMusic puts results from their partners ahead of artists own website *regardless* of the pagerank of the artist site
Google Music is based on whitelisting providers. The stakes are about being a legit source of music with equal access to distribution, promo, and most importantly link love in the first slot of search results. The way you qualify is to be a licensee paying royalties to rehost song files.
DMCA notice and takedown is blacklisting. Things are considered ok until someone with reason to know better objects.
When a garage band posts an MP3 of their band practice on one of the member’s blogs, it would pass a blacklist but not a whitelist.
I’m ok with DMCA notice and takedowns. They create a self-policing system which is able to keep itself in good shape without a central authority. It’s a good thing when rights holders are able to do what they need to without having to go to court.
The only problem with takedown requests is that new instances of songs pop up too quickly for the requests to have an impact. If takedowns could be posted fast enough to keep up, they’d be perfect.
That’s predicated on takedown requests being accurate, so that they aren’t forcing authorized distributors off the net. The request has to go the right site — the host rather than the linker. And linking to an authorized third party site has to be vigorously protected, so that a label can’t sue bloggers for linking to it.