Google said on Friday it will shut its China music download service next month, as the service failed to attract online users. Google Music Search was launched in March 2009 in cooperation with Whale Music (Top100.cn), in order to provide Chinese users with free and legal music.

Google's service was a competitor to Baidu's popular music service, which at the time was providing users with links to copyright-infringing music.

One year later, Google announced it would no longer be willing to comply with Chinese laws and censor searches and moved its Chinese site to Hong Kong. Since then, Baidu's overall share continued to grow and last year, Baidu launched a legal music search in a landmark deal with record labels.

"The impact of this product was not as high as we expected, so we decided to divert our resources to other products," Dr. Yang Wenluo, Google China's engineering research general manager, wrote on Google China's blog.

Chinese users can login and download their saved playlists before October 19, 2012, he added.