Will Google Music Offer Full Song Previews?

The central appeal of Google Music is that it will allow fans to buy music within the company's search engine. Rather than fans seeing solely YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, and lyrics – as well as torrents – when they search for an artist or song in Google, they'll now be able to purchase music too.

However, when a fan goes to purchase a song and they want to preview it first, how long will the stream be? Will fans be limited to 90 seconds like on iTunes or will there be YouTube videos strategically placed next to the preview button?

Since the number of listens to tracks on YouTube number three times the amount of digital downloads, won't Google constantly cannibalize itself?

Companies like Snoost and Tubeify have already built music players on top of YouTube – and have been quite successful at it. How will Google use YouTube?

In effect, the company already offers the number one most popular on-demand method of listening to music for free. Music apps like SoundHound don't bother with the troubles of getting full song previews. Instead, they offer users YouTube videos to play when they've identified a song and want to hear it. Also, there's no better way for sharing music with friends on Facebook than YouTube right now.

Aside from maybe TinySong that is, which is powered by Grooveshark.

Will Google Music – if and when they offer an on-demand service – have catalog holes? If you search for music within Rdio or MOG and they don't have it. They don't have it. With Google Music though, if an artist isn't there, couldn't they just link to YouTube videos and stream the audio just like Snoost and Tubeify do?

Obviously, there's licensing and legality issues that I'm not considering.

But since YouTube has more music on it than any other service, it makes you wonder how that asset will be leveraged or downplayed in Google trying to get their music service off the ground. Google is already paying for the music and monetizing the infringing tracks. With YouTube at hand, there's many things it can do that other services can't, like offer full song previews and rare content.

How do you think Google Music will utilize YouTube?