IndustryReport: Yahoo Developing Music Search Engine

Report: Yahoo Developing Music Search Engine

News.com reports that Yahoo is developing a music search engine that according to the article:

The specialty engine will let people search on an artist’s name, for example, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music.

Yahoo’s Jeff Karnes would not confirm the News.com report at this time. However, the article says that the service should be available in the next few months.

From the way the article reads, the new service sounds like (no pun intended) some type of federated search tool that will simultaneously query music availability from a couple online music services and their own MusicMatch service and merge results into one results list.

The News.com article mentions that along with song availability the service will also retrieve info about the artist, album, etc. from their Yahoo Music database. Here’s what a bio of The Rolling Stones presently looks like via Yahoo Music.

I’ve said for a long time that federated search technology will be one of the “next” big things.

Yahoo purchased MusicMatch last September for $160 million. In February, Yahoo rebranded all of their music properties as Yahoo Music.

The Yahoo Music brand also includes the popular LAUNCHcast streaming audio music service.

When I posted the other day about music information retrieval research at Sun (cool stuff), AllMusic.Com is primary “go to” site for music/artist/performer reference information. This page lists some of what you can do with their powerful advanced search interface. I’ve also use the Tower Records online database and the web version of GraceNote, as music info research tools.

In addition to iTunes, Napster, Microsoft, and Rhapsody, Yahoo will also be competing with services like SingingFish and GoFish.

Finally, if you’re looking for non-musical audio files (sound effects, music samples) on the open web this review of FindSounds.com by Chris might be of interest.

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