Thanks to a new partnership with Muzooka, Gracenote will now feature photos in the music metadata it offers to providers.
The partnership was announced today to allow artists more control over how their music appears on streaming services. Gracenote, owned by Nielsen, is one of the largest music metadata providers in the world.
Muzooka will be delivering image assets to Gracenote to share the information in this metadata. Those images will be embedded with the rest of the metadata that appears alongside the song on streaming services.
Gracenote director of global partnerships Andrew Van Doren says the partnership is aimed at making sure artists have the most control over their appearance on third-party platforms.
“By connecting with Muzooka, Gracenote is giving artists the ability to influence how they appear across our client platforms and on millions of connected devices around the world,” Van Doren said.
Muzooka was founded in 2012 in Calgary as a platform to help artists manage their media assets across multiple platforms. Muzooka also helps artists report setlists to performance rights organizations for live performance royalties from streaming services.
The small start-up was founded by Shawn Wilson and continues to service smaller publishers and artists. Muzooka’s new partnership with Gracenote will undoubtedly help the company expand its reach to new artists, and potentially broaden its clientele.
Muzooka CEO Shawn Wilson says the service will get better the more people who use it. Gracenote’s inclusion of photos and other images in metadata will expand the reach of services offered by Muzooka to artists.
Muzooka currently has a database of around 900,000 artists, but that number will probably grow exponentially with this partnership. Muzooka’s verified artist assets also gives artists more control over how their images are being used by official partners across a variety of networks.