The easiest way to find MP3s in China is by searching on mp3.baidu.com. You’ll find tons of music, including copyright material.

However, I just recently noticed searching for most MP3s from outside of China returns 0 results. For instance, when I was in mainland China I could search for “Linkin Park” and I would get pages and pages of results.

Now I’m in Hong Kong and I just bought a new iPod. I wanted to get a few MP3s on it to test it out, however running the same search from my hotel returns 0 results… Different popular bands/artists yield the same results.

Anyone sensing something shady going on? I remember Baidu getting some heat after their NASDAQ IPO for allowing people to find illegal downloads of copyrighted material. Baidu in response agreed to remove copyrighted material from the results…  I guess they did remove those results — from the view of their American investors. I wouldn’t be surpised to see something like this in their code:

if ( get_user_country() == ‘CN’ )
{
// return results
}
else
{
// return no results
}