Gracenotes

Gracenote is a multinational entertainment metadata and content recognition technology company that provides data and services for music, video, and other media. It maintains large databases containing track-level information, artist credits, album art, release dates, genres, lyrics, and episode guides for films and television, along with associated imagery and descriptors. The company also develops recognition technologies that identify music and video content via audio fingerprints, enabling downstream applications to retrieve metadata automatically. Gracenote's services are used by consumer electronics manufacturers, streaming platforms, car infotainment systems, and software developers to improve search, discovery, and presentation of media.

Gracenote traces its roots to the CDDB database, created in the 1990s to identify audio CDs and fetch track data. The service was later commercialized and expanded, and the brand Gracenote emerged as the company broadened into metadata for music and video and into content recognition technologies. In the ensuing decades, Gracenote built licensing relationships with hardware makers, automakers, and digital services to supply consistent metadata and identification across devices and platforms.

Core offerings include music metadata such as track lists, artist names, album titles, release information, genres, and credits; video metadata including titles, cast, synopses, artwork, and release dates; and content-identification technologies that recognize songs and videos from audio samples. The company also provides developer APIs, artwork licensing, subtitle data, and localization services to support integration across products and services.