Napster Inc., in its quest to appease the recording industry and block access to unauthorized songs, has signed an agreement with a company that maintains an online database with millions of song titles to help identify copyright material.
Napster announced Tuesday it will lean on music catalog specialist Gracenote to help it weed out copyright music. Berkeley-based Gracenote catalogs music for online information access and software applications.
Gracenote also catalogs the spelling variants that have proved troublesome for Napster as the song-swap service tries to comply with a federal court injunction to block the trading of unauthorized content. Gracenote's database of song titles, including misspellings, is about 12 million and is based on user submissions.
"We've been exploring a partnership with Gracenote for months and the ability to quickly enlist their support in our file-filtering efforts will greatly improve our effectiveness," Napster CEO Hank Barry said in a statement. "We are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to comply with the court's injunction."
Gracenote normally provides its services as an added feature to desktop music playing software such as MusicMatch and Winamp, popping up artist and song titles on PCs when users insert an audio CD.
"Our core business is really not helping peer-to-peer networks filter. But it was just a perfect fit," Gracenote president David Hyman said.
Although terms of the deal between the two online companies were not revealed, Hyman confirmed that Napster will have full access to Gracenote's database of music information.
"Personally, I feel like it's a great moment in digital music," Hyman said. "It's part of the solution that keeps the Napster phenomenon alive."<
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