The Wall Street Journal
December 31, 2001
Gracenote's CDDB Database
Started Net Music Revolution
By JASON FRY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
SHAWN FANNING turned the music world upside down with Napster. But
without two other guys with a hobby, the online-music revolution might
have stalled.
Ti Kan, 38, and Steve Scherf, 36, got personal computers to tell which
CD they're playing. It sounds simple: Pop in a CD and the screen lights
up with the name of the album and the songs on it. But teaching
computers to do that proved a big technical challenge. The solution gave
a boost to the craze for turning CDs into digital music files, and paved
the way for those for-fee services the record labels are now unveiling.
The men credit the success of their project, called CDDB, for
compact-disc database, to their own technical legerdemain and to the
contributions of thousands of Net users.
At the end of the odyssey, the hobbyists had become the last thing they
expected to be: businessmen.
The story of how that happened is a reminder of how often big changes in
the tech world begin with individuals working alone on an interesting
problem. It's also a reminder that turning a hobby into a company
requires a different sort of know-how, no less crucial than tech savvy.
IN 1993, Mr. Kan -- then working with Stratus Computers -- put together
XMCD, a program that would play audio CDs on computers that use the
technically oriented Unix operating system. He worked up a basic
disc-recognition system that matched a CD with files kept on a user's
computer. Mr. Scherf -- his colleague and former schoolmate at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, in the late 1980s -- built that
into an on-demand, Internet-based service. CDDB automatically gave
information on any CD it "knew," plus added new information as it came
in from users.
What your PC sees on a music CD is a bunch of digital ones and zeros,
and a "table of contents" that tells where each song begins and ends.
Put a CD in your Net-connected PC and the CDDB sees that it has 19
songs, the first one is 3 minutes and 23 seconds long, the next one is 2
minutes and 10 seconds long, and so on. Your PC then hands that
information to the CDDB, which searches its database of more than a
million CDs for a match. It tells your PC, "That's 'London Calling' by
the Clash -- and here are the song titles and some other information a
user might want."
In most cases, your CD has no such data. It's only in the database
thanks to thousands of users who took time to enter information on their
music.
The service quickly earned a following. In 1997, CDDB fan Graham Toal,
who ran an Internet-service provider in Texas, offered to host a Web
site. Music fans soon overloaded the servers. Mr. Toal then persuaded
Messrs. Kan and Scherf to let him run banner ads on the site to defray
costs. Soon, thousands of dollars rolled in each month from Web ads,
including an affiliate deal under which online-music retailer CDNow paid
CDDB a few cents for each CD bought by customers who had "clicked
through" its ad on the site.
Programmers started to badger the team to let them use CDDB in
commercial products -- something the business-wary team had never
allowed. It was time to find a buyer, to get out of the increasingly
complicated management of the service.
FOR THE THREE, deciding among CDDB's suitors was an unhappy experience.
They found themselves in uncomfortable negotiations facing corporate
representatives making offers the team didn't really understand. "These
big companies came in with their blue suits and their lawyers and their
legalese and we, frankly, didn't know what to do with it," Mr. Kan
recalls.
One of the CDDB team's biggest fears was that a buyer would hobble the
service by reserving the CDDB database for its exclusive use.
One suitor reassured them: Escient, an Indiana maker of audiophile
products. It used CDDB in a 200-CD changer called Tunebase. The company
understood that CDDB's success depended on user contributions, and
wanted to make that an easy process by having CDDB work with as many
CD-player programs as possible.
The following year, Escient acquired CDDB for just under a million
dollars in cash, plus stock. Today, CDDB -- now called Gracenote --
licenses a more robust version of the original service to some 8,000,
mostly noncommercial, users. The service is free for noncommercial
developers, while commercial developers pay an upfront fee of $495 and
an annual charge of six cents per user.
While Mr. Toal is no longer connected with Gracenote, Mr. Kan remains an
outside consultant and Mr. Scherf is a vice president.
The team learned three main lessons that might benefit other programmers
working on a labor of love and dreaming about what to do next in an
industry that still demands constant innovation: Don't avoid the uncool
business of commerce. Don't even dream of not having a lawyer. Get
yourself a business-savvy partner.
Mr. Scherf laments the time CDDB spent without someone "who would shield
us early on from all the evilness and ugliness of business."
When should you look for that person? In Mr. Scherf's view: "When people
come to you wanting to give you money for something, that's the time."
E-mail Jason Fry at
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