This is a wait-and-see item, but initial descriptions don't sound promising. Yahoo! is reportedly developing a music-search service that CNET claims will find audio content "from across the Internet." That—if it corresponded to Yahoo! Video is substance and style—would be quite excellent. But a more detailed description of the service, again from CNET, says: "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." Not so excellent. How would this not be a warmed-over MP3.com (which, by the way, is owned and operated by CNET), which has become an irrelevant piece of digital music real estate. Yahoo! will probably hook the search service into Yahoo!-owned MusicMatch content, but here's the key: If a music service doesn't actually contain music, it won't have much meaning. A search service that points to other music services, each of which has its own search engine, adds nothing more than metasearch value, which isn't much.

Here's a question: If Yahoo! is willing to court the wrath of video content owners over copyright infringement issues in Yahoo! Video (it's amazing what you can find in there), will it be willing to face down the RIAA by providing a similar music-search engine that actually digs up content?

Wait and see, wait and see.