Google has enhanced its search results for musical artist and album names. Thanks to my bro Derek for the heads up and Dave Winer for the link.

It's interesting that Google is partnering with online music stores like Amazon and iTunes instead of trying to take over yet another online business. It's a good way to get into the music business but it makes you wonder if Google will eventually try to sell music themselves. I like that for now Google is sticking with what they do best.

I've already linked to GMS from FanConcert. The artist and release pages have "Google Music Search for this" links which take you to the search results for that artist name or release title.

An interesting little gotcha was ampersands in the artist or album name, like Coldplay's album X&Y or the artist Iron & Wine. Ruby's URL.escape() method wasn't converting the ampersand & into its querystring equivalent %26 so I had to do it myself.

I couldn't quickly find a Ruby String method that substituted all instances of a pattern or substring (sub replaces the first instance) so I got a little creative:

query = URI.escape(text)
if query.include?('&')
  pieces = query.split('&')
  query = pieces.join('%26')
end
url = 'http://www.google.com/musicsearch?q='+query