Gracenote
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| Subsidiary | |
| Founded | October 5, 1998 (as CDDB) July 2000 (as Gracenote) |
| Headquarters | Emeryville, California, U.S. |
| Products |
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| Revenue | $98.76 million (2014) |
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Number of employees
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1,700+ (2016) |
| Parent | Nielsen |
| Website | www.gracenote.com |
Gracenote, Inc. provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and brands in the United States and internationally. Gracenote provides music recognition technologies that compare digital music files to a worldwide database of music information, enabling digital audio devices to identify the 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. The company operates five business verticals: Music, Video, Sports, Automotive and Video Personalization. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, the company employs approximately 1,700 people in 20 offices around the world. Gracenote is now a Nielsen company.
Gracenote is best known for MusicID, a music recognition solution that 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 recognition, universal search, navigation, linking, discovery and personalized recommendations functionalities.
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. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable 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 computer software applications that were capable of playing CDs, for example 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. Redevelopment of Winamp continues by its new owner Radionomy who have said that future Winamp versions will have access to an online music database. In 2014 Tribune Media Company bought Gracenote from Sony Corporation of America. In December 2016, Tribune announced that it had reached an agreement to sell Gracenote to Nielsen Holdings, PLC. for $560 million. The purchase was completed on February 1, 2017.
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