New York - Sony Corporation of America (NYSE: SNE) announced on Tuesday that it will acquire Gracenote, a provider of digital media identification and recommendation services, for $260 million plus other contingent consideration. Founded in 1998, Emeryville, Calif.-based Gracenote developed the CD identification technology that has become the standard used by software like Apple's iTunes, Yahoo's Music Jukebox and Winamp, and on portable music players from Sony, Samsung and others.

Las Vegas - MusicIP, the developer of a global search engine for music, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week the launch of a new, free pricing structure for MusicDNS, its on-demand service that can identify music tracks and deliver accompanying metadata.

Las Vegas - Gracenote, a provider of CD identification and music database technologies, announced that it has developed a new standard for classical music display on digital media devices. The company worked with classical music experts, labels and several prestigious orchestras on the CMI format, which expands typical album, track and artist information to include composer, conductor, ensemble, soloist, work, movement and catalog number elements. Gracenote said it has already converted more than 10,000 of the most popular classical music albums into the CMI format, and will work with labels going forward to input new albums into its database using the standard.