http://gracenote.com/gn_products/discover.html

Editorial – Gracenote's international team of music experts is continually categorizing artists, albums, and songs into over 1,600 micro-genres, as well as assigning other descriptive attributes such as eras, artist types, and regions. This method enables the Discover system to consistently identify music which shares similar inherent subjective qualities, best identified by a human expert, across global content catalogs.
DSP Analysis – Automated and scalable computer-based analysis of the audio waveforms of individual songs using DSP (Digital Signal Processing) techniques can objectively determine musical characteristics such as tempo, timbre, rhythm, instrumentation, harmony, melody and structure of individual songs. Gracenote can integrate third-party DSP data as well as provide even broader coverage through its own database of DSP-derived song descriptors.
Music Community – Gracenote's community of millions of music fans, using popular Gracenote-enabled media players, provides insight into global music consumption patterns. Discover utilizes such exclusive data to create recommendations and can also integrate its customers' own sales ranking data or even third-party collaborative filtering results to augment the recommendations provided by the Editorial and DSP Analysis modules.

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