MUMBAI: In spite of the phenomenal growth experienced by global as well as regional music streaming services, they fail to present an organized catalog of global music. Therefore, Gracenote Global Music Data of Record is foraying in the Indian market to fill this vacuum and provide a detailed data of music, stocked in a well-structured format.

“We are like the one single repository of true information,” exclaimed Gracenote India MD Geet Lulla. He was present along with Gracenote VP Product and Music Tom Retting and Gracenote Senior Product Manager Aditi Arora, who demonstrated the product while citing its benefits.

Gracenote Global Music Data of Record comprises of three key building blocks that aim to offer great music experience while being optimized for international streaming catalogs. These blocks are namely – Catalog of Reference, Multiple Language Support, and Industry Linking.

The Power of Music Metadata

·   Artists > Albums > Recordings

·   Descriptors - Genre, Mood, Style, Era, Language etc

·   Industry and cross-media links

·   Images

Gracenote Music Descriptors

Editorial (Artist  and Album level)

With the help of these classifications, users can discover new music easily, told the trio.

Besides the metadata is divided into three parts: 

• Factual - basic (provided by partner labels)

• Editorial - Qualitative.

• Technolgy based - Sonic Style, Mood. 

Both Editorial and Technology based data is provided by the editorial team of Gracenote. 

But this facility will be available only to the Gracenote customers. When quizzed if the service would be offered as an add-on service or like a separate product, Tom Retting said, “There are a lot of complexities on how we make the product available to customers, who are using it to improve the experience for their consumers. With this service, our customer gets access to all the information if it is a part of their back-end infrastructure.”

Further, when asked if, in future, Gracenote’s model will be extended to the smaller set of consumers, Retting added, “If there is a meaningful commercial opportunity, we would.”

To this, Geet Lulla also added, “For the moment, we would be happy in enabling it for our customers, businesses, to provide richer experiences to their consumers. This is our current business plan.”

Providing data is one thing but keeping it updated is a challenge. On being asked about their plan, when it comes to offering an updated metadata, Tom Retting said, “We have 4000 content partners, who send data to us. We have a very sophisticated mechanism of ingestion, matching, and organizing, which happens in an automated way. After this is the editorial process, which sometimes requires intervention, sometimes not. For example, if a well-known artist is already been classified then we don’t have to intervene when the album is released. We just associate that album with the respective artist. For the track level step, we do it through machine learning, which is an automated process as well. So, our focus is on new, emerging artist in classifying that process.”

Apart from being up-to-date, the authenticity of the metadatabase also matters. When asked about the authenticity of data, Retting explained, “When you are dealing with tens of millions of records, there is always some information that’s going to be wrong, but when it is brought to our attention, we will editorially intervene to fix that. But, we assume the factual data as it is being provided to us by the labels. The rest of it is the data we are providing. So, classification, say, of an artist genre is something our teams are highly trained in. We have processes for everybody to understand, how our job of classification works so that they supply consistently.”

“In a way, we try to enable our customers by giving them this very rich data; we try to help them with our understanding of best practices around,” Tom Retting concluded.

With such detailing, Gracenote Global Music Data’s debut in the Indian market is to watch out for.