Two stories making news (and noise) this week.

The most breaking is the one that online retailer Amazon.com will soon be getting into the download biz. The Wall Street Journal broke the story of Amazon execs in talk with record-label execs about a music offering that would include individual song downloads as well as a monthly subscription service. MusicNet, a NY-based distributor of digital music is in partnership talks for the project which is said to launch in the fourth quarter of this year. This is a bold move by a big player, but will Amazon be able to provide enough user value to compete with iTunes? It’s anyone’s guess.

The second story is that of Yahoo releasing a search service for audio files. The test version out now allows users to search more than 50 million music and audio files on the Internet, including podcasts, speeches, and interviews. Yahoo will get a share of revenue for songs bought from competing music sites. Yahoo promises to be “like Switzerland” when it comes to returning search results, but we’ll see…I’m sure Google won’t be far behind on this one.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.