Gracenote: Music Databases in New Places

04:19 | Michael Johnson | Jan 18th, 2007 12:55pm |

At the International CES in Las Vegas, Jim Hollingsworth, senior vice president of marketing for Gracenote, talks about the music database company and its new applications for cars, mobile phones, lyrics search and more.

Transcript:
Host: Michael Johnson - PodTech
Guest: Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Hi, it’s Jim Hollingsworth, Gracenote; the Senior VP of marketing and sales.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay. Now, Gracenote is a name that I know a lot of people know from popping a CD into iTunes. iTunes goes and checks with a Gracenote database. So, it’s about, Gracenote is about information and support, but tell me a little bit about what you’re showing here, because there’s some pretty interesting thing.

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Sure. Well, Gracenote as you said, Gracenote is a backend technology service and content provider, and we power a lot of the digital music applications and services like iTunes, AOL, Winamp, Yahoo! Music, Real Rap City. We’re also embedded in the consumer electronic devices for major brands like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, many others, included in car audio products, one of the features that we’re showing here at the show. To give you an idea of our breadth and depth, last year Gracenote had about 200 million users worldwide, and we did over 13 billion searches of our database.

So, we’re acted in over 200 countries and regions, we have content in 80 different languages. What we’re showing at the show today is really going beyond the basic metadata, and we have a number of new products that we’re demonstrating and announcing here. Around embedding our technology into consumer electronic devices, one of our new products is called Media Box, this is really designed primarily for the car space, but applications in many areas, where you can actually navigate your music library just by the spoken word. So, now that digital Juke Boxes are coming to the car, and you may have five, even ten thousand songs, no way to get from Awa to ZZ Top just pushing…

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Without going off the road.

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Right, just going next track, next track or trying to create a playlist on a little car UI. With our Media Box technology all you have to do is say which you want. So, you can say play me my 70’s Jazz, play me my 60’s Female Solo Singers from San Francisco. Using any of the metadata information that Gracenote stores and then delivers through the IDE process, you can use that to navigate the best features. The one that I like the most is more like this feature, where you simply hear a song that you like, all you have to do is say, play more like this.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
It’s a discovery tool too as well.

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Yes, it’s automatic playlisting, so it looks at your whole library of music, and then finds the songs that have the same musical attributes, artist type, genre. We actually categorize music into 1700 micro genres from very fine granularity around the different types of music. We bring all of these data elements together and make it instant and intelligence, so it’s simple for the consumer to use. Some of the other things that we’re showing around are the real rich content with the music. So, things like the album track at artwork, artist’s biographies, album reviews, who are the influencers, who are the followers of certain band.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
All that stuff is missing from your download that we stay on one album (Voice Overlap).

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Right, so it’s digital in some very sensitive to catch up to the physical world in terms of experience, and a big part of that one, a big focus is our new lyrics service. So, Gracenote is the first company that’s actually going out and acquired all the licenses and then a mass, critical mass on the lyrics to be able to deliver lyrics with all the popular music.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
How many languages?

Jim Hollingsworth - Gracenote
Right now, it’s for North American market, so it’s primarily in English but if it’s a popular song that’s sung in a foreign language, we’ll have that as well, but we’ll be launching a little bit later in Q1 with our first partner out into the market that will be using lyrics primarily for searching and discovering the music.

So, you’re driving down the street, you heard this new song, I don’t know who the artist is, I don’t know the title, but I remember that hot lyric, like Let’s Dance like We’re in Love. You can simply type in to the Gracenote lyrics search, Lets Dance like We’re in Love, and it will show you all the songs with that lyric in it, then you can find it and connect directly to the store it and listen to it, buy it, try it, and certain things.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
All right. If folks want to find out little bit more about Media Box and Lyrics Service out, what’s the Website?

Jim Hollingsworth – Gracenote
www.gracenote.com.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Alright, Jim Hollingsworth from Gracenote, thanks for speaking with us, here at the floor of CES International in Las Vegas.

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Tags: CES, Jim Hollingsworth, Gracenote, music database

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