Slashdot Mirror
Gracenote, Privacy, and the Rise of Metadata As a Valuable Asset
Nerval's Lobster writes "Earlier in February, Tribune Company completed the $170 million acquisition of Gracenote, a deal originally set in motion in late 2013. The merger is an unusual one: Gracenote owns a massive library of media metadata, and the Tribune Company is best known as the publisher of print newspapers and tabloids, most notably its flagship paper in Chicago. Regardless of the Tribune Company's specific plans for Gracenote's datasets and technical infrastructure, it spent a hefty amount of cash on an entity devoted solely to compiling metadata about copyrightable works owned by third parties: In other words, Gracenote still commands a nine-figure price tag when its primary product, to put it bluntly, amounts to footnotes and annotations to media for which it doesn't have licenses or rights. But here's where it potentially gets a little spooky: while the titles of the songs in your playlists shouldn't be conflated with records of your phone calls, services such as Gracenote's upcoming Rhythm Internet-radio service (which leans heavily on user preferences and behavior) may help Gracenote partially convert its library of media metadata into a library of user data. 'We do have big hopes for that part of our business going forward,' Gracenote president Stephen White confirmed to Slashdot. That makes privacy advocates a little nervous. 'We're seeing, especially with the ad space, that companies are trying to get user information from all different sources, and it's not just what brands are looking for anymore,' Ari Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Slashdot. 'They're trying to get location data, financial data, habits, family so I'm not surprised that audio data could be one of the big facets.' (For his part, White insists that Gracenote is careful with data collection.) The Gracenote saga suggests that metadata — even the type that doesn't come from phones or social networks — is more valuable than ever, which is liable to get some companies really excited... and make a whole lot of people very, very nervous."
Considering that the Gracenote database only covers audio CDs it seems rather pointless in a world moving toward digital formats with embedded metadata.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Back in the 1990s, I helped run one of several mirrors for CDDB. When the company suddenly took a proprietary turn, they shut all of those down. They sent message promising to give some sort of reward to everyone who had run a mirror, but nothing ever showed up.
I guess a couple of million would probably make it up....
In seriousness, this was an early wakeup call about contributing to "community" projects without clear licenses for submitted data. And here I will put in a plug for FreeDB, which forked the original and continues to run it in an open way, with submissions under the GPL. http://www.freedb.org/en/about...
Tribune Media Company, owned by Tribune Company, publishes TV listings for various guides (set-top boxes, TiVo, etc).
'We do have big hopes for that part of our business going forward,' Gracenote president Stephen White confirmed to Slashdot.>
Since when is /. in the news-making department rather than just the news aggregating department? Maybe I'm just out of the loop on this....
Well, let's start by stipulating that there's no inherent difference between "data" and "metadata"; it's all just data.
"Metadata" is simply data that's not germane to a particular task. For example, the IP address you are posting from is not germane to this discussion we're having, but it might be useful for figuring out whether you're a sock puppet astroturfing the site. The metadata on a MP3 track is not germane to the task of listening to that song, but it is germane to selecting other songs like it.
I can think of three reasons to purchase a company that curates a body of metadata. The first is to build and sell services based on that data. The second is to charge for access to that data. The third is to do commercially useful stuff with that data, or as a side effect of providing that data -- e.g. marketing to users of the database based on their request records. If you have a very high tolerance for false positives, you can find out a lot of things about people by the songs they listen to.
I suspect the value of Gracenote is that it has the most complete database of its kind, which also happens to be the most widely used database of its kind. That makes it an unique property. The Tribune isn't paying $170 million for Gracenote's current revenues, I'm guessing, but rather as part of a plan to exploit Gracenote's unique market position for some other purpose.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm not particularly careful about my online behavior and with all of the news about massive tracking of consumer habits, why are the adds I see so badly targeted? I went to key west for a week, and for months later received banner adds on Google for things in Key West. I stayed at a Las Vegas hotel, and immediately afterwards received tons of adds for....Las Vegas hotels. I'm quite sure that if I bought a car, I'd see tons of car adds. It seems that advertisers haven't learned that simply collecting data does not provide the information they need - the goal is to provide adds to people for things that the WANT TO BUY, not to provide add for things that the NO LONGER NEED.
This leads me to wonder if advertisers are getting any real value out of all this tracking information that they are paying for.
Gracenote sounds familiar, but they are the ones who commercialized CDDB! Also now they are owned by sony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's the problem with these for profit companies. Now everyone is selling my meta data, for lookups that I had never even considered left a footprint. Hopefully my DNS servers are not thinking of commercializing my metadata! how far can they go in search of every last scrap of profit? commercialize ntp! why the fuck not!!!! profit profit profit! stocks go up up up!!!
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