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April 22, 2008
Sony acquires Gracenote ...finally
It was inevitable that someone would acquire Gracenote...particularly once Macrovision snatched up AMG. The big surprise, of course, was that it was Sony. Sony's digital music forays have often been closed environments (a la iPod) that failed.There's a ton of hate for Gracenote out there (still...as can be seen on the comments of this article) and Sony after the rootkit fiasco also has garnered its fair share of detractors. After the announcemnent hit, I read through comments on many blogs such as techcrunch, I was amazed at how many people were worried about Sony/Gracenote "spying" on them...seems so strange in the era of last.fm, MOG and ilike where playcount tracking is part of everyday life...where people put up badges of the cool stuff their currently listening to on all their social networking sites...
This aspect of the acquisition doesn't bother me in the least. I just find it odd that such a consumer brand would acquire a b-to-b service...sure Sony has other divisions that sell to business but i think this is the first b-to-b service from Sony.
On the other hand, it is not like Sony had anything going in the digital music space...as of late, their ATRAC format was a doozer, Sony Connect was shut down, the PSP has low sales compared to DS, their MP3 players are non-existant in US. Acquistion is the only route for them, really....
Posted by raza at 5:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack