Gracenote’s Jim Hollingsworth Talks About Powering The Digital Media Experience
Jim Hollingsworth, SVP of Gracenote, met with me at Digital Hollywood. Jim was kind enough to go through interview twice, as it appeared our first take didn’t seem to record. It took some work, but I was able to recover the first interview session and I’m glad because the first take is almost always the best. Jim told me about each of the major Gracenote businesses.
Gracenote is a fascinating company with an incredible database of information about the music we listen to. Metadata about the music, artwork, lyrics and popularity information all get used to provide music retailers such as iTunes and digital device companies like Sony with the platform to provide information to the music consumer. The company supports over 2 billion searches for music every month and as a result knows what music is popular right down to the neighborhood level.
The service powers music search, play list creation, music discovery on the web, in digital devices and even in the cars we drive.
Gracenote also powers the Yahoo service that allows you to search for lyrics. If you to go to Yahoo Music and search for a song you will see the lyrics below the song. I put a red arrow on the screen shot to highlight the lyrics.
In addition to music, Gracenote has entered the video marketplace with a similar database about video and is rolling out new products in that area. Jim tells me to stay tuned as they have some exciting news ahead in the video area that they plan to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Technorati Tags: Gracenote, Digital Hollywood, Music
November 19th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Alex, you also might interview Macrovision about their announced purchase of AMG and then ask Jim Hollingsworth what he thinks of his competition once again. AMG has been successfully winning away Gracenote’s core media identification customers since the launch of their “Lasso” service a year or two ago. Several of the customers mentioned in the interview have already moved to Lasso including RealNetworks (Rhapsody and Realplayer) and Sony (PS3 and a new 200 Blu-ray disc server). AMG competes directly with Gracenote in music identification, recommendation, and playlist generation; AMG leads the market for movie (DVD) recognition (which Gracenote cannot currently deliver); and AMG is the gold standard for quality database licensing (which Gracenote does not even attempt). Gracenote is ceratinly an interesting company, but it hardly operates in a competitive vacuum, and is probably not the most comprehensive company in the industry.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Craig,
Do you know anyone over there that would be interested in giving an interview?
Alex