MUMBAI: Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is launching its Global Music Data, the catalog of reference for the music industry, in India. The solution localizes Gracenote’s comprehensive collection of descriptive music information for the Indian market, enabling regional music and global streaming services to now deliver advanced search, discovery and navigation of India-based music to fans all over the world.
At a recent conference held, today, Gracenote India MD Geet Lulla said, “The idea of launching Global Music Database of Record in India is to get the Indian clients. But for this, it wasn’t enough to have international content but make Indian content also available. Currently, our focus is our customers to help them provide a richer experience to their customers.”
Lulla also cited an example of how it would be easy to get the entire discography of Indian legendary music composer and singer, R. R. Burman by searching him with ‘Panchamda’ as known by Indians.
Gracenote Senior Product Manager Aditi Arora also said, “We aim to provide a unique single entity, one clean version instead of having 10 different tracks in the database. We do not want 10 results appearing for a track in the search engine.”
To this, Gracenote VP Product and Music Tom Retting added, "We use our fingerprinting technology to be able to determine that this is actually the same recording on these tracks so that the different version of tracks of Indian artists are identified as unique recordings while representing them just once."
Speaking about how this metadata will benefit their clients Lulla told, “Our metadata enables our clients to help their consumers discover more music, which they would otherwise not have heard. The second thing it enables them to do, through links like Sonic, is recommendations. This kind of micro-segmentation enables consumption of larger volume of music and hence allows music labels to make more money.”
The Gracenote Global Music Data solution aims to help solve India’s music data challenge by normalizing Artists, Albums and Recordings with a proprietary ID system that associates the right content with the right recording artists, actors and music directors. Leveraging industry-standard media linking and IDs, Gracenote Global Music Data enables smarter search and discovery of playback singers across digital media catalogs, including linear TV, movies and VOD. In addition, the latest database supports key local languages and alternate names to power playlisting and search using voice assistants and smart speakers.
On being asked if the discography of an artist is available to normal consumers, the trio, collectively, told no, but did mention about having clients like Spotify, Apple etc., excluding Gaana, Saavn etc. "We also provide metadata to other companies, who do not provide content in streaming forms, but metadata themselves, search engine like Google, Bixby for Samsung," Lulla added.
A vibrant and complex music market, India is experiencing massive growth among local listeners as well as fans around the globe. The market is driven by a close relationship to the Bollywood film industry with popular musical scores and soundtracks dominating the landscape. While typical Western music catalogs are organized by artist, recording and album, the popular music scene in India features a range of talent, from playback singers and actors to music directors, lyricists and songwriters among many others featured in films. With more than 1,000 movies released annually, the data challenges that underpin next generation search, discovery and navigation are compounded. Further complicating matters are India’s 22 official languages and variances in music popularity by region.
Gracenote General Manager of Music and Auto Brian Hamilton also said, “India is one of the fastest growing music markets in the world and also one of the most complex.”
“With the strong ties to Bollywood, there are multiple singers, actors and directors on a single tag or field that creates metadata challenges. Gracenote is now applying its world-class ID structures, metadata standards and AI/machine learning skills to make Indian music more searchable and discoverable to help services drive engagement and interactivity with fans in India and around the globe,” Hamilton added.
Gracenote’s unmatched database of deep, descriptive music information covering genre, era, origin, tempo and mood already serves as the backbone of the music industry. Gracenote Global Music Data leverages the best music experts in the world and applies state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to scale recording-level descriptors to tens of millions of songs. As a part of the solution, global and regional streaming music services will have direct access to Gracenote’s latest music descriptor which classifies the “style” of individual musical recordings for more powerful search and discovery experiences and more personalized playlists.
Meanwhile, Gracenote Global Music Data is now available in eight markets including the United States, Korea, Japan, Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and now India.
