Over the last couple of years, Google has been slowly (very slowly!) opening up the ability for celebrities, politicians, sports teams, museums and local businesses to post social media-like updates directly to its search result pages. Today, after testing this in a few markets over the course of the last year, Google is also opening this feature up to musicians in the U.S.
This means that when you search for the likes of Kygo, Lorde, Steve Aoki, Sia, Son Little, Sofi Tukker and Shakira, you’ll likely see updates from the artists (or, more likely, their publicists) in the sidebar, too. Those updates can include text, videos, GIFs and links to other sites.
Until now, Google had an application process for users and organizations who wanted to have access to this features. With today’s update, it is also making this process quite a bit easier. Musicians who want to participate simply have to search for their own name and then look for a link to sign up inside the Knowledge Panel (the sidebar panel with all the additional information about an artist). If you are an artist whose name does not trigger a Knowledge Panel, though, you are not famous enough and you’re out of luck.
By making signing up this easy, Google is probably laying the groundwork for opening up this feature to virtually everybody whose name triggers a Knowledge Panel. If the speed of the rollout of Posting on Google so far is any indication, though, that’ll still take a while.
