The New York Times Bits blog (see our blog roll on the right) said it has inside scoop that Google will announce a new music service next week in L.A.  They report:

Several reports today indicate that Google is set to introduce a music service at an event at the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood on Oct. 28. The service, we’ve confirmed from three people briefed on the details, will offer searchers a better way to find and sample music on Google — much in the same way people can get detailed financial information about a company from Google Finance.

According to this and other reports, Google is teaming up with iLike (which is owned by MySpace, which, in turn, is owned by Fox/News Corp.), Lala and Imeem.  For folks who search on a band or a specific music title, Google will show a page dedicated to the artist or the song, including biographical info, song lyrics, photos, listings for upcoming concerts and links to music streams on partner sites.

Meanwhile, The Times is also reporting that Facebook will add Lala to its gift store.  Remember that Microsoft’s Bing powers search on Facebook, and Bing has moved aggressively to match moves made by Google in recent months, so it may only be a matter of time (or mere minutes) before we here of a similar effort by Bing, though it should be noted that Bing already does a great job of doing what Google will apparently announce next week.

For instance, using the example in the The Times blog post, take a look at the Bing result for Green Day:

Now take a look at the same search query on Google:

So maybe Google feels it has some catching up to do with Bing.  Maybe Bing will feel it has a few deficits relative to Google’s new offering, so it, too will announce partnerships (probably with Facebook, since they’re already in bed together).  In any event, it’s all good for search marketing — ever more queries will continue to come on to the search engines.