Gracenote's Big Music Data Gets More Popular With Next Big Sound

EMERYVILLE, Calif., Jan. 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Gracenote®, the leader in music and video recognition and discovery technology, announced that it will incorporate Next Big Sound's real-time music consumption and trending data into its new Gracenote Rhythm™ music Discovery and Internet Radio platform.  Combined with Gracenote's own metadata, editorial expertise and powerful algorithms, Next Big Sound's data will help Gracenote identify and spotlight popular and emerging artists within its products across all genres.  

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Next Big Sound's data will be paired with Gracenote's music recognition insights, gleaned from more than 600 million daily searches of the Gracenote database, creating one of the best sources of music discovery.  When layered into Gracenote's Rhythm Discovery platform, Next Big Sound will help Gracenote's customers create music services that deliver highly personalized recommendations with the right blend of music from existing catalogs and hot, new emerging artists on the verge of "breaking out." 

"With Next Big Sound, we are taking a wider view of the music world to better understand what is happening in music right now and then applying those insights to track-level music recommendations for our customers," said Stephen White, president of Gracenote.  "We now have the right blend of Gracenote trend data, broader industry analytics and play data to build out the most robust and accurate Recommendation and Discovery platform available on the market today."

Next Big Sound has collected more than four years of public social data, from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, for almost every artist in the world. This data is correlated with marketing activities and sales/streaming numbers for more than 70 percent of recorded music across labels, artist managers, publishers, agents and major technology leaders.  For Next Big Sound, the relationship with Gracenote will drive new applications of its data analytics in conjunction with Gracenote's new Internet Radio API to serve up music recommendations for online music listeners around the world.

"Our popularity and trending data has grown to become the definitive source of predicting breakout artists and sounds across the music industry," said Alex White, CEO and co-founder of Next Big Sound.  "Gracenote has a long, storied history of making data useful for the entertainment industry and is a company we've long admired and respected.  Today, I'm excited to see the marriage of Gracenote's rich data and products with our strategic insights as our first endeavor in fueling discovery and driving recommendations for music streaming services."

Next Big Sound will also aid Gracenote in identifying trending artists and tracks in real-time to improve how Gracenote's global team of music experts prioritizes new and emerging artists into its music database.  This will drive faster and broader visibility of new and emerging artists from around the world through Gracenote's platform. 

Gracenote Rhythm is a fast and reliable DMCA-compliant platform, built upon the most robust and scalable music platform available today.  In addition to advanced recommendation and discovery capabilities, Next Big Sound will also expand Gracenote's ability to offer its Rhythm customers direct linking to social media profiles for over a million artists across major social sites including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube/Vevo, Soundcloud, Instagram and Wikipedia. 

The Gracenote Rhythm Internet Radio API will be made available to commercial customers and developers in February 2014.

About Next Big Sound
Launched in 2009, Next Big Sound is the leading provider of online music analytics and insights. Next Big Sound gathers social, sales and streaming data into one central platform. Sources range from Facebook and Twitter, where artists frequently interact with their fans, to Wikipedia and artist websites, where fans go to learn more about the artists, to Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, where most music is consumed in this day and age. To put this information in to context, event data such as concerts, release dates, television appearances and press mentions are incorporated, as well as the rich demographic data that helps artists become more acquainted with their fan base. Next Big Sound is used by thousands of individual bands and managers as well as the biggest labels and distributors in the world. Next Big Sound powers the Social 50 and Next Big Sound branded chart for Billboard, has raised $7.5m in venture capital and is based in NYC.

About Gracenote
Gracenote, Inc. provides music and video content and technologies to the world's hottest entertainment products and brands. Gracenote is the industry standard for music and video recognition and is supported by the largest source of music and video metadata, featuring descriptions of more than 180 million tracks and TV listings for 30+ countries. A wholly owned, independent subsidiary of the Sony Corporation of America (SCA), Gracenote has offices in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Seoul, Taipei and San Francisco with worldwide headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. For more information, visit our website www.gracenote.com or follow us at @GracenoteTweets and www.facebook.com/PoweredbyGracenote.

Gracenote is a registered trademark of Gracenote, Inc. All other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Media Contact:
Sunok Pak
Gracenote, Inc.
spak@gracenote.com
(415) 999-4646

SOURCE Gracenote