Search giant Google has entered the online music market with a new service for finding and buying music online.

OneBox is an alliance with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike. The US-only service allows people to search using song titles, artists or using snippets of lyrics and will also stream sought-after tracks.

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at research firm Forrester, said the service may offer a compelling alternative to illegal file-sharing. "Apple can do little about iPod owners downloading from BitTorrent," he said in a blog post. "But Google on the other hand can." BitTorrent software is widely used to trade music and movies. "Just imagine if when a consumer searches for a song, alongside all of those Torrent results is a heavily integrated Google music offering."

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8331290.stm