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Gracenote is a commercial enterprise which maintains and licenses a database containing information about the contents of audio CDs. The database is accessible online over the Internet. Computer software applications such as iTunes that are capable of playing CDs use Gracenote's CDDB or similar commercial services such as All Media Guide's AMG LASSO and MusicIP, or open-source projects such as freedb and MusicBrainz. These programs generally offer the option of contributing track listings, and most of the track listings in the Gracenote database are voluntary contributions by individual users of CD-player software.

Additionally, Gracenote operates a digital file identification service which allows digital music files to be idenfied. As well as a media managment services for media management such as the generation of playlists, and recommendation of music.

Gracenote's database is mainly created via the contributions of its many users. If the music is not available in the Gracenote database, the service requests the user to input information such as the artist, album, and song names related to the music. Gracenote also receives some music information from third pary database companies and record labels.

Background

Gracenote began in 1993 as an open source project involving a CD player program named xmcd. The xmcd player was developed by Ti Kan, and had the ability to store and recognize CDs from a database included with the application. The database within the xmcd application is the original CDDB. xmcd users regularly sent additonal CD information to Mr. Kan for inclusion in the database via email. By 1995, the database had become unwieldy and Steve Scherf, a friend of Mr. Kan was recruited to build a server to store the CD information in a network database. The service quickly outgrew Scherf's ability to host and a larger server, hosting facilities, and an advertising business model was provided by an ex-pat Scot living in Texas, Graham Toal.

CDs do not generally contain any digitally-encoded information about their contents (see CD-Text), Kan developed software which identifies and looks up CDs based on TOC information stored at the beginning of each disc. A TOC, or Table of Contents, is a list of offsets corresponding to the start of each track on a CD. The matching is fuzzy and tolerates some variation in track offsets.

Some computer users who have copied vinyl LPs from their turntables onto CD-Rs have been suprised to find their computers correctly displaying the titles and track listings when these CD-Rs are played on their computer. This happens when a commercial CD is a remastered version of an LP, containing the same tracks in the same order. If the track offsets of the homemade CD match the track timings of the commercial CD to within a second, the CDDB database can identify the CD successfully.

Commercialization and controversy

In 1998, the service was purchased by Escient, a high-tech venture firm and operated as a business unit within the Indiana based company. CDDB was then spun out of Escient in July of 2000 and renamed Gracenote (press release). The maneuver was and remains controversial, because the CDDB database was and is built on the voluntary submission of CD track data by thousands of individual users, who received no compensation for their work. Initially, most of these were users of the xmcd CD player program. The xmcd program itself was an open-source, GPL project, and many listing contributors assumed that the database was free as well. However, at some point the code for xmcd was modified to append copyright notices to all submissions. How visible or open this was to contributors remains a matter of debate. Many contributors of track listings were angered at the transfer of these listings to a profit-making entity which proceeded to make money by charging license fees for access to a database of track listings which individuals had contributed for free.

As of 2005, Gracenote claims that its database contains information on almost 4 million CDs. The reliability both of this statement and of the database itself have been challenged. Because the information going into the database has not been subjected to quality control, duplicate entries are very common. David Jennings, in an article entitled "How many CDs are there in the world?" gives an example of a six-CD set in which "two of the six CDs appear twice in the database, and one appears three times." An article on the Seattle Times website cites Ty Roberts, chief technology officer of Gracenote, as saying that there are approximately 500,000 individual CD titles commercially released and available for sale today in the United States.

Lawsuits Against Licensees

The commercialization of CDDB by Gracenote also caused friction with its former licensees. In 2000, Gracenote sued Roxio for breach of contract when Roxio tried to switch to freedb. The case was settled in 2001.

Gracenote v. Musicmatch

In 2002, Gracenote sued another former licensee, Musicmatch, for breach of contract and patent violations. Musicmatch filed a counter-suit against Gracenote. The Northern District Court in California ruled on August 26, 2004 in favor of Musicmatch. The case was settled in 2004 after Musicmatch received summary judgement on all of Gracenote's patent claims.

A summary judgement found that Musicmatch's CDDB replacement service does not violate Gracenote's patents. The court also found significant evidence that Gracenote may have obtained its patents fraudulently. The court order is available online. Later, the court issued a decision that Gracenote did not obtain its patents fraudulently, but the decision that Musicmatch does not violate any of Gracenote's patents was clear.

There has been speculation that Yahoo! had been holding off its decision to purchase Musicmatch for nearly seven months until the August 26th court order was issued. According to this speculation, the court decision "may have cleared the financial picture" for Yahoo!'s purchase of Musicmatch. The purchase of Musicmatch by Yahoo! was announced only two weeks after the August 26th court decision. Musicmatch and Gracenote settled shortly thereafter.

Until the Musicmatch case, Gracenote attempted to aggressively use its patents in an attempt to enforce a monopoly in commercial CD indentification services. The inability of Gracenote to enforce its patent in the Musicmatch case opened the market for competition, and a growing global group of companies continue to enter media identification and metadata marketplace.

A summarized overview of the case is available at the Manatt website within Mr. Robert D. Becker's list of representative cases. Mr. Becker was one of Musicmatch's lawyers during the case.

Competition

Many of Gracenote's small former licensees moved to non-commercial services such as freedb because of restrictive terms and anger over the privatization of the company. Several large commercial licensees dropped Gracenote's service, such as Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Musicmatch Jukebox, and have moved to the commercial service provided by All Media Guide.

The AMG LASSO media recognition service was launched in late 2004 by All Media Guide. The service allows for the recognition of DVDs and digital audio files such as MP3s, as well as CD recognition, and directly competes with Gracenote in the software and embedded device markets globally.

MusicBrainz is another music identification service that is open source and created by community contributions. MusicIP is a commercial service which identifies music, and is reliant on the MusicBrainz project.

External links

• All Media Guide (AMG)
• AMG's LASSO
• freedb
• Gracenote
• Gracenote's Legal Page - links to PDF files of some of the court documents from the Roxio and Musicmatch cases.
• MusicBrainz
  • Template:Musicbrainz wiki
• How many CDs are there? Reliability of Gracenote database questioned
• Gracenote official estimates 500,000 CD titles currently available for sale in the U. S.
• Article about Gracenote's business in Japan

• Online music databases
• Acoustic fingerprinting