Demian Bellumio and Bill Hajjar of Senzari announced the launch of MusicGraph, which the company says is the world’s first knowledge engine for music, during SIME MIA in Miami this week.
MusicGraph will be available as a consumer app across most major mobile platforms, as well as a powerful “graph API” that can be leveraged by developers to enhance their applications with deep musical intelligence. MusicGraph contains over a billion facts that have been organized into a rich music ontology, which includes acoustical and lyrical features, detailed artist, album and song information, as well hundreds of other data points related user preferences, the company said in its news release.
“We are very excited to unveil MusicGraph, which constitutes over two years of our work,” said Demian Bellumio, COO of Senzari, in the release. “It all started when we were looking for a music recommendation engine to license for our own music service, and we found the few market alternatives to be very limiting in terms of data and features – all meant to build a Pandora clone. But even more frustrating was the onerous licensing structure, whereby you not only need to give up part of your business, but also have no real visibility into what is going on under the hood."
Senzari said MusicGraph leverages the most advanced “graph computing” and “Big Data” technologies to create large, distributed graphs, which contain detailed information of over twenty million songs, and are connected to millions of individual albums and artists across all genres. The information includes proprietary data generated via feature extraction from the music, like tempo, chord progression, and key, as well as lyrical data, such as ‘bag-of-words’ and concept extractions derived from lyrics.
The consumer version of MusicGraph has first been launched on the Firefox OS platform in order to support Senzari partner, Mozilla, in development of this initiative. MusicGraph will be expanded to iOS, Android and Windows Mobile users in the coming weeks. With the app, users will be able to ask the service very detailed questions about the music they love, for example: “Who are artists that are similar to Coldplay that were born in Manchester and are male?”
The MusicGraph API is available under a “developer” model, which is free of charge, as well as a commercial licensing model. “We are excited to see howm the market responds to our approach, as such a level of data access has not been common in the music space,” said Hajjar, CEO of Senzari. “More importantly, we are pricing our API starting at $499 and increasing based on usage, which is at least ten times lower than market alternatives."
The MusicGraph apps will be accessible at musicgraph.com and developers can learn more about the API at developer.musicgraph.com.