In Post-CD Era, Gracenote Makes a Big Business of Content Recognition | Xconomy
Summary
For every ripped album, Apple’s iTunes software would contact Gracenote’s database, which would run the music through its audio recognition system and send back track and artist names and cover art. It has large divisions that work with TV manufacturers, cable networks, and other content distributors on video recognition technology, and with automakers on systems that help drivers use voice commands to navigate their music playlists. In fact, the Gracenote service handles 10 billion queries a month—which, if it were a search engine, would make it bigger than Bing (but not quite as big as Google). Record labels, artists, publishers, and movie and TV studios submit more than 100,000 new songs and videos to the company every week, and a large editorial team at Gracenote does nothing but curate and enhance this data. There’s software that creates a fingerprint for every file, and plenty of machine learning algorithms to help describe elements of the submissions, such as their mood and tempo.
