Yahoo keeps rolling with new stuff. Tonight it’s audio search. From the release:
Yahoo! Search is the first major search engine to deliver an audio search product that provides users access to over 50 million audio files from major music services and independent publishers. Yahoo! Audio Search provides access to a variety of audio files including podcasts, music downloads, albums and spoken word such as newscasts, speeches, and interviews, as well as other audio related information including music videos, album reviews, artist images and artists websites….
… Yahoo! Audio Search’s integration with My Web, Yahoo!’s new social search engine, enables users to save audio searches, creating a personal, searchable Web of favorite audio Web pages. Moreover, My Web users can share their musical tastes with their communities by creating RSS feeds of their saved Web pages.
Gary has a complete review here. From that:
…what Yahoo is releasing today is a different. It’s a one-stop service (metasearch, sort of) that allows the user to search, find, and access both “open web” audio files (via a Yahoo crawl) along with audio files from numerous music/audio (fee-based) services including Yahoo’s own Music Unlimited, iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, Emusic, GarageBand.com, and other services. Of course, to download these files you’ll need to pay.
That’s right folks, you’ll need to pay. Get used to this, I’d wager it’s coming from Google as well – search as the interface to finding and then paying for stuff. It’s about time, in my humble opinion. Imagine when Google oneboxes (ie adds results automatically like they do with Local) Google Print, for example, or audio, or video….when nearly every search suggests something that can be purchased. Why, it’s a veritable ecommerce nightmare for Amazon and eBay. No wonder they are so into search…
I wonder how much of the content money will be made from the search itself, where the engines will be catering to the one in ten people diving into the long tail on a daily basis to find cool content, versus supporting a social network, where the nine friends either sit back and subscribe or only buy ‘oneboxed’ content with a friend’s endorsement. Y! is definitely on to something there.
a glance at a new business model for the music industry? Using the potential of online distribution in combination with search, community and recommendation services. This will enable both producers and consumers to easily enter the long tail…From this perspective i particularly like the ability to let users download from the open web to get knowledge of unknown artists. Very interesting to see how the RIAA will respond to this opportunity now that a player like Yahoo is entering.
BTW: we developped a similar concept -> http://www.mp3.nl
a glance at a new business model for the music industry? Using the potential of online distribution in combination with search, community and recommendation services. This will enable both producers and consumers to easily enter the long tail…From this perspective i particularly like the ability to let users download from the open web to get knowledge of unknown artists. Very interesting to see how the RIAA will respond to this opportunity now that a player like Yahoo is entering.
BTW: we developped a similar concept -> http://www.mp3.nl