Nielsen-owned media data specialist Gracenote wants to help music services make better mixes with fewer outliers: The company announced a new music dataset called Sonic Style Wednesday that classifies 90 million tracks not by the genre the artist is known for, but the actual style of the recording. This will allow services making use of Gracenote's data to for instance compile a playlist of all of Taylor Swift's dance pop hits, while keeping anything that sounds too much like country out of the mix. Or combine The Clash's old-school punk tracks without adding some of the bands new wave fare. "Now that playlists are the new albums, music curators are clamoring for deeper insights into individual recordings for better discovery and personalization," said Gracenote music and auto GM Brian Hamilton. Gracenote has been in the music data business for close to 20 years.

Nielsen-owned Gracenote has announced the launch of an artificial intelligence service called Sonic Style that will sort massive catalogs of music by style for the first time ever. Sonic Style will classify 90 million songs not by the genre of music the artist is known for, but rather the actual style of each individual recording. Music has typically categorized by artist genres, such as rock or hip hop. However, artist genres alone do not always tell the full story of an artist's full catalog or career. Gracenote has developed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptor values.

Sonic Style is hoping to shake up the way music is traditionally categorized, moving past the typical overarching genres like rock or hip-hop to classify each song on a granular level. To that end, Gracenote has amassed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptors that create a "style profile" of each recording and can pair machine learning descriptors such as tempo and mood with editorial ones, like artist genre, era, and origin. For example, the press release suggests the service can mine through Taylor Swift's catalogue to figure out which songs are more pop, more country, more pop electronica, or god help us, more R&B. That level of musical understanding will hopefully help smart speakers, voice assistants, streaming services, and, yes, even measly humans create better, more personalized playlists. "Sonic Style applies neural network-powered machine learning to the world's music catalogs, enabling Gracenote to deliver granular views of musical styles across complete music catalogs," says Brian Hamilton, Gracenote's general manager of music and auto, in a statement.

Sonic Style is hoping to shake up the way music is traditionally categorized, moving past the typical overarching genres like rock or hip-hop to classify each song on a granular level. To that end, Gracenote has amassed nearly 450 Sonic Style descriptors that create a "style profile" of each recording and can pair machine learning descriptors such as tempo and mood with editorial ones, like artist genre, era, and origin. For example, the press release suggests the service can mine through Taylor Swift's catalogue to figure out which songs are more pop, more country, more pop electronica, or god help us, more R&B. That level of musical understanding will hopefully help smart speakers, voice assistants, streaming services, and, yes, even measly humans create better, more personalized playlists. "Sonic Style applies neural network-powered machine learning to the world's music catalogs, enabling Gracenote to deliver granular views of musical styles across complete music catalogs," says Brian Hamilton, Gracenote's general manager of music and auto, in a statement.

The Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) will again be well-represented at the 2018 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, taking over Las Vegas Jan. 9-12. This is the second of two stories looking at what some of MESA's members will be showcasing at the largest technology show in the world. Accenture: The expanding connectivity and uses of artificial intelligence (AI), the fueling of the Internet of Things (IoT) by fifth-generation (5G) networks, and the growing consumer applications of blockchain technology will be key stories to watch at the show, according to Gregory Roberts, managing director of Accenture's North American high-tech industry practice. "Additional stories to track will be products becoming more software-smart and the use of in-vehicle AI to drive the connected car market," he said. The expanding connectivity and uses of AI will be a central storyline at CES, he predicted, adding: "The story will be about more pervasive use of the technology than at last year's CES, spanning a wider range of applications, connecting to more devices and networks."