Why has Sony bought Gracenote?
$260m is a lot to pay for a pile of information about a dying music format – but Sony might just have made the deal of the century. The entertainment giant now has the biggest store of music metadata in the world, with the acquisition of Gracenote. The deal is expected to be completed in May. Gracenote has its roots in CDDB: a kind of Wikipedia of user-submitted CD track information, which ran on Xmcd, a piece of open source software. While it initially shunned commercial deals, the maintainers made a deal in 1998 to go commercial. It’s now the de facto way software such as iTunes acquires track information – and it’s spawned a successful business, estimated to be worth about $40m a year.
