Gracenote, Next Big Sound Collaborate on Customizable Radio Platform

Digital music service Gracenote is gaining traction with plans for a customizable Internet radio program that would allow consumer brands, car companies (and anyone else) to have their own music app, according to The New York Times.

Gracenote revealed plans to collaborate with music data company Next Big Sound to enhance how it analyzes listeners’ habits and make recommendations for new music. Gracenote, which claims it has data on 180 million songs, is utilized by Apple, Amazon, Spotify and other companies to identify and organize digital music tracks. Next Big Sound focuses on social media chatter surrounding songs; it reaches out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia and other sources to see what songs fans are paying attention to.

Gracenote president Stephen White envisions Gracenote’s system, called Rhythm, can be used by any company to create a radio service tied to its own product or websites. White mentioned that car companies might be the most interested, as they can develop a system to be used in all of their cars around the world.

Next Big Sound has become one of the leading providers of social-media data for the music industry, parsing billions of streams, tweets and searches to tell a picture of how fans are interacting with music they like. Earlier this month, the company released its analysis of online music in 2013, which found, for example, that 0.2 percent of all musicians account for 53 percent of Facebook page likes among artists and 65 percent of the Twitter followers.