Gracenote’s Big Music Rhythm To Use Next Big Sound Data

Gracenote, the leader in music and video recognition and discovery technology, announced that it will incorporate Next Big Sound’s real-time music consumption and trending data into its new Gracenote Rhythm music Discovery and Internet Radio platform. Combined with Gracenote’s own metadata, editorial expertise and powerful algorithms, Next Big Sound’s data will help Gracenote identify and spotlight popular and emerging artists within its products across all genres.

Next Big Sound’s data will be paired with Gracenote’s music recognition insights, gleaned from more than 600 million daily searches of the Gracenote database, creating one of the best sources of music discovery. When layered into Gracenote’s Rhythm Discovery platform, Next Big Sound will help Gracenote’s customers create music services that deliver highly personalized recommendations with the right blend of music from existing catalogs and hot, new emerging artists on the verge of “breaking out.”

Stephen White

“With Next Big Sound, we are taking a wider view of the music world to better understand what is happening in music right now and then applying those insights to track-level music recommendations for our customers,” said Stephen White, president of Gracenote. “We now have the right blend of Gracenote trend data, broader industry analytics and play data to build out the most robust and accurate Recommendation and Discovery platform available on the market today.”

Next Big Sound has collected more than four years of public social data, from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, for almost every artist in the world. This data is correlated with marketing activities and sales/streaming numbers for more than 70 percent of recorded music across labels, artist managers, publishers, agents and major technology leaders. For Next Big Sound, the relationship with Gracenote will drive new applications of its data analytics in conjunction with Gracenote’s new Internet Radio API to serve up music recommendations for online music listeners around the world.

Alex White

“Our popularity and trending data has grown to become the definitive source of predicting breakout artists and sounds across the music industry,” said Alex White, CEO and co-founder of Next Big Sound. “Gracenote has a long, storied history of making data useful for the entertainment industry and is a company we’ve long admired and respected. Today, I’m excited to see the marriage of Gracenote’s rich data and products with our strategic insights as our first endeavor in fueling discovery and driving recommendations for music streaming services.”

Next Big Sound will also aid Gracenote in identifying trending artists and tracks in real-time to improve how Gracenote’s global team of music experts prioritizes new and emerging artists into its music database. This will drive faster and broader visibility of new and emerging artists from around the world through Gracenote’s platform.

The Gracenote Rhythm Internet Radio API will be made available to commercial customers and developers in February 2014.