News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

April 23, 2008

music

Sony and Gracenote to make beautiful music together

Posted Apr. 23, ’08, 8:08 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Music

Sony + GracenoteSony has long been desperate to get its foot in the door of online media. But, as they say: if it at first you don’t succeed, consider acquisition. Yesterday, Sony shelled out $260 million to buy Gracenote. If that name sounds familiar, it ought to: Gracenote maintains the archive once known as the CDDB, the source for that “Get CD Track Names” you’ll find in iTunes.

According to Sony, Gracenote will remain more or less intact, continuing to provide its services to the many vendors that use them (including Sony itself). You may also recall that as of a couple of years ago, Gracenote also has a deal in place with the record companies that allow it to provide lyrics as well, a feature that has not yet been leveraged in iTunes, despite the existence of a Lyrics metadata field.

Does the acquisition mean anything for Mac users? Given Apple and Sony’s current relationship (which we’ll call one of frenmityship), we don’t really think so—at present. Then again, if Sony follows its usual game plan, expect it to turn Gracenote into a qualitatively better but ultimately unsuccessful proprietary format.


2 Comments

Eduardo said:

Apple should have bought the company; they could have had both a chipmaker and a software company in the same week (well they aleast aquired the chipmaker this week).

April 23, 2008 11:16 AM
Anonymous said:

It is frightening to think what Sony will do with Gracenote. Are they going to monitor all the music I hear? After the rootkit fiasco, I do not want Sony spying on met. I no longer trust companies that use Sony or Gracenote. I hope that Apple dumps Gracenote quickly.

April 24, 2008 8:38 AM

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