Gracenote creates new standard for classical music display on digital devices

Gracenote has demostrated at CES a new data management and delivery method within its service that resolves the decade-long struggle by classical music fans to view accurate, complete and consistent classical music information on digital devices. Gracenote worked closely with the classical music community to create this new standard, which has been endorsed by classical music experts, music labels, and several prestigious orchestras.

First True Digital Media Solution for Classical Music Displaying complete and consistent classical music information in the digital world is a problem that has frustrated the classical music audience since the advent of digital music. The user interfaces of most popular music management applications and devices are designed primarily for use with pop music genres such as R&B, Rock and Country, utilizing three-line displays that typically only show Album Title, Track Title and Recording Artist information when a song is played.

However, music in the classical and opera genres does not fit neatly into these three categories. Most critically, it is essential to display the Composer name in addition to Recording Artist when organizing classical music collections. Additionally, the Recording Artist is not typically just a single name, but is comprised of several independent parties, including the Conductor, Ensemble, and Soloist. Likewise, Track Title is not just the name of a song, but typically incorporates unique Work, Movement, and in some cases, Catalog Number elements.

Because of inconsistent efforts to adapt classical music information into the three-line constraints of digital devices in the past, many anomalies have occurred. For example, the "Artist" field sometimes includes Recording Artist name, while at other times it shows the Composer name, and core information such as Movement and Symphony numbers are sometimes dropped, resulting in "Symphony #5" being ambiguously displayed as just "Symphony."

These problems, caused by the lack of a systematic approach to cataloging and displaying classical music in a three-line display, make it difficult for the user to easily navigate their music library, make meaningful playlists, or find the specific track or segment they would like to hear. Gracenote's CMI solves these problems and is the industry's first system to accurately and consistently present all of the key elements required to identify a classical music track within the standard three-line display.

The Gracenote Classical Music Initiative has received support and endorsements from classical artists, experts, critics, and customers including symphonies such as the San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; music labels Naxos and Harmonia-Mundi; and top classical music scholars and authors.

"Classical music metadata has been a problem for music labels and publishers, retailers and certainly music fans since digital music was first developed, and we have greatly needed a viable option for displaying classical music in an easy and consistent manner," said Junko Gardenour, business development manager, Digital Services, Naxos of America, Inc., the world's largest independent classical music label. "We believe the Gracenote system offers the best classical metadata structure and has set the standard for one of the industry's greatest challenges."

To date, Gracenote has converted more than 10,000 of the top classical music albums into the CMI format; these highly popular albums account for nearly half of all classical music look-up queries on the Gracenote service in the last 12 months. The number of CMI-formatted albums grows each day as the company takes data feeds directly from labels, artists and other content sources and matches those against its Classical Works database to transform the data into the CMI standard.

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Back 12.01.2007