Gracenote standardizes Classical music information.
Gracenote's Classical Music Initiative™ (CMI™) presents all of the key information about an individual classical music track accurately within the standards for consumer electronic device application displays.
CMI resolves a longstanding dilemma in digital music. The challenge is that most music management software and hardware devices display three lines of text for the album title, song name, and recording artist, while recorded music information in the classical and opera categories rarely fits into three text fields. Classical tracks require more space for work titles, composers, conductors, soloists, and ensembles.
Gracenote developed a way to display the performing artist, album title, track title, and composer, while satisfying the limitations of the information displays. The Classical Music Initiative depends on the work of Gracenote classical music editors as well as automated data transformation methods. The editors use Gracenote's Composition Database and waveform fingerprints to review for internal matches.
Editorial Process
- Transform data quickly using scalable data entry operation by classical music experts
- Prioritize data by composition prevalence and global popularity
- Build upon the normalized Composition Database, including tens of thousands of composers, conductors, soloists, ensembles, and classical works
Automated Process
- Propagates data from the Composition Database through an internal matching process
- Uses waveform fingerprints for exceptional match confidence
- Submitted for editorial review to avoid false positives
Data feeds from content partners
- Patent pending transformation process converts partner data into CMI format
- Label Partners include Naxos, Sony BMG, and Telarc
- Aggregator partner IODA distributes 85 classical labels in the United States, including Arabesque, Gimell, Harmonia-Mundi, LSO Live!, and Ondine
Support from the Classical Music Community
Gracenote CMI has been endorsed by classical artists, critics, customers, and experts, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Other endorsers include music labels Harmonia-Mundi and Naxos and top classical music authors and scholars.
Worldwide classical coverage
Gracenote has converted more than tens of thousands of the top classical music albums into the CMI format representing half of all classical music lookup queries on the Gracenote service in the last 12 months. The number of CMI-formatted albums grows each day using data feeds directly from labels, artists and other content sources and matches those against our Classical Works database to transform the data into the CMI standard.