MUSIC DESCRIPTORS

Gracenote Global Descriptors Power Meaningful Discovery

Every streaming music service on the planet is driven by data. It’s an essential ingredient to today’s music experiences. And Gracenote has descriptive data for practically every song ever recorded. All of this descriptive information is used to make deep connections between artists and tracks, creating radio stations and playlists that share common musical characteristics.

Gracenote has the industry’s most comprehensive source of descriptive music data available today.

Genres

Sonic Styles

Languages

Global Descriptor System

Gracenote has the world’s deepest source of descriptive information for music having classified millions of tracks at the artist level by Genre, Origin, Era, Artist Type and Language, as well as at the recording level by Mood, Tempo and Style. This data fuels the engines for the world’s most popular music services, helping fans uncover more of the music they love.

Scalable Solution

Gracenote combines editorial experts, real people around the globe with a passion for music, with advanced machine learning technology to extract and classify musical characteristics. The combination of human and machine enables Gracenote to scale to tens of millions of tracks.

Global Genre System

The Gracenote Genre System features more than 2,824 unique genres, with 515 track-level sonic style descriptors, and supports more than 484 languages. This proprietary music classification system is built with a global audience in mind, presenting genre and style hierarchies that are regionally relevant, such as J-Pop in Asia and Bollywood in India.

Product Benefits

Gracenote has the industry’s most comprehensive source of descriptive music data available today.
Customers can seamlessly map music descriptors to artists and recording in their catalog through Gracenote’s Global Music Data.
Track-level descriptors for Mood, Tempo and Style are derived from audio analysis, with multiple values assigned to track and weighted to reflect the music.
Flexible delivery via Gracenote Global Music Data through export files and API.

Gracenote Descriptor System

2,824 Genres, 515 Sonic Styles, 484 Languages

Available Music Descriptors

Genre: Describes the musical style of the Artist, Album, or Recording.
Language: Artist Language indicates the languages in which the artist has recorded in.
Origin: Indicates the geographic region(s) with which the recording artist is most strongly associated.
Era: Indicates the time period(s) in which the artist created its most relevant recordings.
Artist type: Indicates the configuration in which the artist typically performs.
Sonic Mood: Track-level perceptual descriptor of a piece of music, using emotional terminology that a typical listener might use to describe the audio track.
Sonic Style: Describes musical style elements detected in a Recording using machine learning, based purely on the nature of the recording audio itself, and are different from Artist Genres, which describe the musical and cultural context of an artist and are assigned editorially.
Tempo: Indicates the 3 most perceptually relevant beat rates detected in the Recording.