ZDNet is reporting that Yahoo plans to release some sort of “speciality” audio search engine in the next few months:

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.

I’m not sure how exciting or newsworthy this is? Shouldn’t Yahoo have a good audio search engine already at Yahoo Music? I put in Black Sabbath, I should primarily get material back from their search engine on the band Black Sabbath. So they are going to search across multiple services? How is that going to work? Are they going to spider their way into iTunes and Napster’s music database and offer comparison shopping? Somehow I doubt this is what they are doing.

What would be cool is if I remembered a few words from a song I heard on the radio and put that into a search engine and it returned me songs with those lyrics and allowed me to buy that music. I’m sure somebody has already thought of that, but if not, then maybe Yahoo’s new specialty search will have this feature. Since they bought MusicMatch (for $160 million, yowsa), that coupled with Yahoo Music should give them plenty of data to draw from.

Another cool thing would be an API to plug into this speciality music database. I’m guessing that’s a lock.