[mb-users] Last.fm launches audio fingerprinting stuff

[Russell Garrett]

I'm a little perplexed about the reactions to our announcement of this: 
the first thing you've got to consider is that MusicDNS is a closed, 
proprietary system. Just because the guys at MusicIP gave MusicBrainz a 
free license doesn't mean that Last.fm (as a paying MB licensee) is 
obliged to use them too (for more money).

Last.fm now employs some of the best minds in the field of MIR, and we 
believe that our new fingerprinting system is more accurate than 
anything else out there. Additionally, we couldn't easily use the 
MusicIP system for the statistical moderation system we're planning due 
to the way PUIDs work.

Granted, the internals of our system are closed and proprietary too - 
unfortunately one of the downsides of being a for-profit company is that 
you can't give anything away for free (because we'd dearly love to). 
There will be open APIs for the fingerprinting services, however.

We have no intention of dropping MusicBrainz (especially since it's 
taken so long to get the license in the first place!). MB is a lot more 
than just the fingerprinting: we think MB is a great source of metadata 
- and the more metadata sources we have, the better. Our fingerprinting 
services will definitely return MBIDs in the future.

I hope this clears things up a bit,

-- 
Russ Garrett
Last.fm Ltd.
russ at last.fm