Mixcloud Taps Gracenote for Advanced Music Recognition to Improve Royalty Payment Process for Rights Holders

Gracenote, a Nielsen company, announced that it will power advanced music recognition for Mixcloud streaming platform, using next-generation audio fingerprinting to help identify and catalog copyrighted music within user-generated content. Using Gracenote's MusicID music recognition technology, Mixcloud will more accurately identify copyrighted audio content on its music platform to ensure proper royalty payments to rights holders.

Music streaming service Deezer has announced its own song recognition feature SongCatcher, offering an integrated choice for users who want to find out the names of particular songs or artists when listening to music. A similar feature as offered by popular apps Shazam (recently acquired by Apple), and SoundHound, Deezer sees an advantage on implementing the recognition functionality directly in its player.

As officially confirmed to some online media outlets, following insisting rumors that circulated since December 8, Apple is buying Shazam, the music recognition and audio fingerprinting service that is one of the most popular apps in mobile platforms. Together with rival SoundHound, Shazam has gradually evolved into a sort of "gluing" app, helping users discover, interact with, and share music, videos, as well as printed or augmented reality content.

Gracenote, now a Nielsen company, confirmed that it is now featured in more than 100 million cars globally, powering intuitive, personalized and safer music experiences for drivers and passengers around the world. As an early pioneer in in-car infotainment, for nearly 15 years, Gracenote has delivered data and technology solutions for drivers and passengers to discover and connect with the music they love.

Shazam, one of the world’s most popular audio recognition apps, announced the launch of a massively scaled augmented reality (AR) platform for its brand partners, artists and hundreds of millions of global users, adding visual recognition to its popular music identification service. Beam Suntory, Inc., the world's third largest premium spirits company, has signed on as one of several launch partners.