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One of the key enabling technologies for the ecosystem that will ultimately become the celestial jukebox is a universally used, free, Song ID system.    A Song ID system unambiguously assigns an an ID, (much like a UPC product code), to each unique audio recording.  The ideal SongID will be able to distinguish between various performances and remixes of a song, while still recognizing that different encodings and equalizations of a song are still the same song.   A universally used songID will allow  various music tools and services to work together.  People will be able to easily share playlists, recommenders will be able to refer listeners to tracks in any music service provider collection.  It will be easy to find the metadata (album art, reviews, bibliographic info, lyrics) for a song.

There's no shortage of commercial songID system.   The problem is that they all cost money, and they tie you to a particular vendor's silo (songID, metadata, recommender).   No one vendor's songID has enough traction to become the universal songID. 


The one system that has the best shot at becoming the universal songID system is the MusicDNS system.  The MusicDNS system was created by  the folks at MusicIP.  With the MusicDNS system, you use their open-source fingerprinter to get a fingerprint of audio. This fingerprint is sent to MusicDNS that (much like the Internet DNS), will resolve the fingerprint into a songID (update - and some a bit of metadata including track and artist name) that can then be used to retrieve metadata associated with the music from metadata sources such as  MusicBrainz (a wikipedia-like source of music metadata).


I like the MusicDNS system because they have open-sourced the client and have worked very closely with MusicBrainz to make sure that the system will be available no matter what happens to MusicIP.  (Spend a few minutes talking to Robert Kaye, the founder of MusicBrainz, and you'll hear nothing but good things about MusicIP and MusicDNS).

The MusicDNS system has always been free to use for non-commercial use, but if you were a commerical entity you had to negotiate a deal, and it was hard to predict what the final costs would be.  (They would charge based on the number of songID lookups). 

MusicDNS has just restructured how it charges for use.  A non-commercial license still is free for 5 million lookups per month. (Update -  commercial access of up to 5 million requests per month is also free)  But now with the restructuring a commercial license costs $250 per year for up to 100 million lookups per month!  That is so incredibly cheap that it should be a no-brainer even for the smallest web 2.0  music startup.  In fact it is so cheap that I doubt if it even covers the costs of running the MusicDNS lookup servers.

MusicDNS is doing all of the right things. They are supporting MusicBrainz, an excellent source for music metadata.  They have opensourced the fingerprinting client. They have made the cost to use the system cheap enough so that anyone can use it .   I really hope each and every one of those new music discovery companies (you all know who you are) will just start using this system.  If we are all using this system, we can interoperate, we can trade playlists, we will all be steering our metadata updates to MusicBrainz, so our metadata will get better.  The music ecosystem will be a better place.