Mobile phones continue their march towards capably integrating music features that take advantage of a phone's wireless connection. Gracenote, long known for its massive music database and its ability to identify music, is branching out into the mobile world with its Mobile Music 2.0 Platform for hardware, software, and service providers.
Designed as a way to unify the PC, the phone handset, and the music store service, the Mobile Music 2.0 Platform is the next evolution of Gracenote's MusicID, a waveform fingerprinting and search technology introduced three years ago. The new Mobile Music 2.0 platform launches in Sony's upcoming W910 Walkman phone, and K850 Cyber-shot phone, both due out in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Typically, the Gracenote database is integrated into software and services, such as Apple iTunes or Yahoo! Music Jukebox. The services that comprise the mobile platform are optimized for exploring and enjoying music on a mobile phone. More importantly, perhaps: The services will now do so in a more consistent manner.
For example, the platform will enable Gracenote to serve up album artwork and what the company describes as "editorial content" around the music itself.
"The big problem with mobile [today] is that it's a very disjointed experience," notes Gracenote's Jim Hollingsworth, senior vice president of sales and marketing. "The media management on your PC isn't optimized to manage your library and transfer it onto your phone. When you get content from the download world, the metadata can be different between what you transferred from your PC and what you downloaded from the store." The Mobile Music Platform aims to transform that experience.
Also new: Gracenote has expanded its MusicID capability--which enable you to hold to capture some music on the phone, and then identify the track--to include music search. You can type in an artist, track title, album name, or even a snippet of lyrics, and the mobile phone's text search will access Gracenote's database and return results. From those results, in the example of the announced Sony Ericsson scenario, you can then go to Sony Ericsson's PlayNow store (or to the store of your service provider)--where you can buy the track or the ring tone. And, through Gracenote's Discover recommendation engine, the company will even show you similar content in the store.
The benefit to this integrated platform of services, according to Hollingsworth, is that the process minimizes how much navigation you'll need to do manually on the phone handset. This could be a boon for users, given how diminutive handsets can get.
"The technology has to be integrated into all three elements, the PC application, the handset, and the store," says Hollingsworth. "But that's what's going to make the experience so much better."
