Gracenote, Inc. is a company and service that provides music, video, and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies worldwide.[3] Formerly CDDB ("Compact Disc Data Base"), Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. From 2008 to 2014, it was owned by Sony, later sold to Tribune Media, and has been owned since 2017 by Nielsen Holdings. In 2019, Nielsen Holdings announced plans to split into two separate publicly traded companies, Nielsen Global Connect (later known as NielsenIQ and sold) and Nielsen Global Media. In October 2022, Nielsen Holdings (by then comprising of Global Media business), including the Gracenote subsidiary was acquired by a private equity consortium.
Gracenote began in 1993 as an open-source project involving a CD player program named xmcd and an associated database named CDDB. xmcd and CDDB were created by Ti Kan and Steve Scherf. Because CDs do not contain any digitally-encoded information about their contents, Kan and Scherf devised a technology that identifies and looks up CDs based on TOC information stored at the beginning of each disc. A TOC, or Table of Contents, is a list of offsets corresponding to the start of each track on a CD. Its original database was created from and continues to receive voluntary contributions from users. This led to a licensing controversy when Gracenote became commercialized.
On April 22, 2008, Sony announced that it would acquire Gracenote for $260 million.[4] The acquisition was completed on June 2, 2008.[5]
On December 23, 2013, Sony announced it would sell Gracenote to Tribune Media for $170 million. The acquisition closed in February 2014: Gracenote was aligned with the Tribune Media Services division which focused on TV and Movie metadata and IDs.[7][8]
On June 12, 2014, Tribune Media Services merged with Gracenote to form one company under the Gracenote name.[9]
On July 9, 2014, Tribune Media Company purchased What's-ON, a provider of TV data and advanced search offerings covering India and the Middle East for $27 million.[10]
On September 3, 2014, Gracenote acquired Baseline, a Los Angeles–based provider of film and TV data and information. Baseline had previously been owned by the NY Times from 2006–2011 after which it was sold back to its original owners. This $50 million purchase deepened Gracenote's existing video datasets and added the Studio System database, a subscription-based resource for the Hollywood content creation and distribution communities, to its line-up of offerings.[11]
On October 2, 2014, Gracenote purchased Australia-based TV and movie data company HWW for $19 million US to expand its Asia Pacific presence and international offerings.[12]
On May 28, 2015, Gracenote acquired Amsterdam-based Infostrada Sports and Halifax-based SportsDirect, providers of music, video and sports data.[13]
On December 20, 2016, Tribune Media announced that it was selling Gracenote to Nielsen Holdings for $540 million in cash.[14] The deal officially closed on February 1, 2017.[15] In September 2017, Gracenote partnered with Connekt and Ensequence to deliver real-time offers on smart TVs.[16]
On November 7, 2019, Nielsen announced that it was splitting into two separate publicly traded companies.[17] Gracenote fell under the company's Global Media business.
After divestiture of NielsenIQ (the former ACNielsen consumer research business) in 2021, Nielsen became solely a media audience measurement and analytics firm including Gracenote.[18][19]
In October 2022, Nielsen and its subsidiaries (including Gracenote) were purchased by a private equity consortium led by affiliates of Elliott Investment Management and Brookfield Business Partners in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16 billion, including the assumption of debt.[19]
Gracenote is known for MusicID, a music recognition software which identifies compact discs and delivers artist metadata and cover art to the desktop. The Gracenote database includes music genre and mood information, TV show descriptions, episode information, and channel line-ups, movie cast and crew information, and sports statistics and results. Companies including music services, TV providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and automakers use Gracenote data to power their content, universal search, navigation, linking, discovery and personalized recommendations abilities.[citation needed]
Gracenote's music recognition technologies compare digital music files to a worldwide database of music information, enabling digital audio devices to identify songs. The company licenses its technologies to developers of consumer electronics devices and online media players, who integrate the technologies into media players, home and car stereos, and digital music devices.[2]
It provides software and metadata to businesses which enables their customers to manage and search digital media. Gracenote provides its media management technology and global media database of digital entertainment information to the mobile, automobile, portable, home, and PC markets. Several software applications which were capable of playing CDs (e.g. Media Go and iTunes,) used Gracenote's CDDB technology. Winamp, once a major licensee, no longer has access to Gracenote; the legacy media player program lost access to Gracenote when SHOUTcast and Winamp were sold by AOL in 2014.[20] Redevelopment of Winamp continues by its new owner Radionomy who have said future Winamp versions will have access to an online music database.[21][not specific enough to verify]
With the acquisition by Tribune Media in 2014 and subsequent acquisitions of What's-ON, HWW, Baseline, SportsDirect, and Infostrada Sports, Gracenote has expanded its core data product beyond music into video and sports.
Gracenote's early product line-up consisted of MusicID, Mobile MusicID, Music Enrichment, Discover, Playlist, Playlist Plus, Media VOCS, Classical Music Initiative, and Link. In April 2007, Gracenote launched the first[23] legal lyrics offering in the U.S. that was sold to LyricFind in 2013.
Gracenote's current Music offerings fall into three major categories: Music Recognition, Music Data, and Music Discovery. Its music recognition product called MusicID was originally developed as a CD track-identification system. Gracenote also operates a digital file identification service that uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify digital music files such as MP3s and deliver track-level metadata, album art, and links to complementary content and services. Its music data offering provides information describing Genre, Mood, Era, Origin and Tempo for tens of millions of songs.[24][25][26]
Gracenote Auto puts Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology into the car's audio system to identify music playing from various sources including AM/FM and satellite radio, CDs or streaming services and deliver relevant metadata and cover art. In December 2015, Gracenote launched its first audio technology, Gracenote Dynamic EQ, designed to help automakers and OEMs automatically tune connected car audio systems to the optimal equalizer settings for individual songs based on genre, mood and release date.[27]
Gracenote's video platform called On Entertainment consists of TV listings and schedules for approximately 85 countries and 35 languages as well as TV and Movie data and related-imagery information for six million TV shows and movies. On Entertainment is supported by standardized TMS IDs for TV shows, movies, and celebrities. These IDs enable universal search across linear TV, OTT and VOD libraries and make possible "season pass" DVR recordings.[citation needed]
Gracenote Sports provides live scores, play-by-play data, historical results and records, schedules, player profiles, and athlete biographies for 4,500 leagues and competitions such as the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, Premier League, F1, Bundesliga, Tour de France, Wimbledon, and the Olympics. Gracenote's Podium product tracks all Olympic competition results and rankings at elite and junior levels as well as historical Olympic data going back to the very first modern games in 1896. In September 2015, the company announced DVR Extend which enables TV providers to dynamically adjust DVR settings to ensure live sports game recordings do not get cut off in the event they go past scheduled broadcast times.[28]
In 1998, CDDB was purchased by Escient, a consumer electronics manufacturer, and operated as a business unit within the American company. CDDB was then spun out of Escient and in July 2000 was renamed Gracenote. The CDDB database license was later changed to include new terms. For instance, any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup. Then, in March 2001, only licensed applications were provided access to the Gracenote database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, so programmers using Gracenote services were required to switch to CDDB2 (a new version incompatible with CDDB1).
This has been controversial, as the original CDDB database was created out of anonymous contributions, initially via the open source xmcd CD player program. Many listing contributors believed that the database was open-source as well because, in 1997, cddb.com's download and support pages had said it was released under the GPL. CDDB claims that the license grant was an error.
TiVo Corporation, formerly known as the Rovi Corporation and Macrovision Solutions Corporation, was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. Now operating as Xperi, the company is primarily involved in licensing its intellectual property within the consumer electronics industry, including digital rights management, electronic program guide software, and metadata. The company holds over 6,000 pending and registered patents. The company also provides analytics and recommendation platforms for the video industry.
MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.
Freedb was a database of user-submitted compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc was in the database, the client was able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information.
A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3.
Nielsen Holdings plc is an American media audience measurement firm. Nielsen operates in over 100 countries and employs approximately 15,000 people worldwide.
Electronic programming guides (EPGs) and interactive programming guides (IPGs) are menu-based systems that provide users of television, radio, and other media applications with continuously updated menus that display scheduling information for current and upcoming broadcast programming. Some guides also feature backward scrolling to promote their catch up content. They are commonly known as guides or TV guides.
High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio. The usage profile HE-AAC v1 uses spectral band replication (SBR) to enhance the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) compression efficiency in the frequency domain. The usage profile HE-AAC v2 couples SBR with Parametric Stereo (PS) to further enhance the compression efficiency of stereo signals.
TV listings are a printed or electronic timetable of television programs. Often intended for consumer use, these provide information concerning programming scheduled to be broadcast on various television channels available to the reader – either via terrestrial, free-to-air, cable, satellite or over-the-top MVPD – indicating at what time and on what channel they are due to be broadcast over a period usually encompassing about seven- to 14-days in advance.
Audience measurement calculates how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic. The term is sometimes used with regard to practices that help broadcasters and advertisers determine who is listening, rather than how many people are listening. In some parts of the world, the resulting numbers are referred to as audience share; in other places, the broader term market share is used. This broader meaning is also known as audience research. Measurements are broken down by media market, which corresponds to large and small metropolitan areas.
tvtv Services, trading as tvtv, is a consumer-oriented pan-European electronic programme guide (EPG) service provider, owned by the arvato AG subsidiary rtv media group GmbH since January 2013. It was formerly broadcast on Freeview channel 304 until 30 October 2008.
HWW was an Australian-based organisation which supplied television and movies metadata to a broad range of clients across new and traditional media including: online publishers, subscription television providers, IPTV providers, HbbTV providers and print publishers.
CastTV was a former Internet video search and aggregation company based in San Francisco, California. After the company was acquired by the Tribune Company in 2010, its popular consumer website was closed down and the core technology was used to build various enterprise data products, including Online Video Data, which powers the universal video search for Google, Roku, TiVo, and other online video providers.
CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote, Inc.
Studio System by Gracenote, formerly known as Baseline StudioSystems, is an American e-commerce company. It was founded in 1982 and licenses its commercial entertainment database, known as Studio System. It is owned by Gracenote, a subsidiary of Nielsen Holdings.
Xperi Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, that develops software for consumer electronics and connected cars, as well as media platforms for video service over broadband. The company is organized into four business units: Pay-TV, Consumer Electronics, Connected Car, and Media Platform. Xperi's brands include DTS, HD Radio, and TiVo.
Music information company Gracenote changed its database terms to closed-source in 2001. This caused some controversy because Gracenote's ancestor, CDDB, had previously said its database was released under the GPL.
Peter Liguori is an American business executive who most recently held the position of president and chief executive officer of Tribune Media; he departed the company at the end of March 2017. He was appointed to the positions in January 2013, and is also a member of Tribune Media Company's board of directors. During his tenure, the company acquired Local TV Holdings, LLC, doubling the size of its local television station group, and Gracenote, combining it with Tribune Media Services to form one of the world's leading providers of entertainment metadata.
TMS is an international provider of data for TV and movies. As part of its On Entertainment product line, the company supplies data to companies such as TiVo, Roku, Virgin Media, DIRECTV and Time Warner Cable to enable entertainment guides and applications. In addition, the metadata is used for media measurement and analysis. TMS also produces Zap2it, a social TV hub that connects entertainment fans to popular TV shows, movies, celebrities, and other fans. TMS is a data provider for over 4,000 companies. The company is headquartered in upstate New York.
Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a technology used to identify content played on a media device or presented within a media file. Devices with ACR can allow for the collection of content consumption information automatically at the screen or speaker level itself, without any user-based input or search efforts. This information may be collected for purposes such as personalized advertising, content recommendations, or sale to customer data aggregators.
David Hyman is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unagi Scooters, a manufacturer of electric scooters, which launched in December 2018. Hyman is also the former CEO of Beats Music, MOG, Gracenote and Blin.gy.
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