Shareholding of Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer Venture

MusicTrace GmbH

The Company

MusicTrace 

MusicTrace GmbH was founded in 2004 as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany. We use state-of-the-art multimedia technology to gather information about the broadcasting of music and advertising. Within a very short period of time, we were able to win numerous customers for our broadcast monitoring services and, thus, a high market share not only in Germany but also throughout Europe.

In addition we are very successful in licensing digital audio watermark solutions. Software licensing is offered worldwide to download shops for music and audio books, music promotion portals, collecting societies and other companies.

Services and Products

Airplay Monitoring Services

Broadcast Monitoring

MusicTrace monitors numerous radio and TV stations around the clock. The implemented system is able to recognize music or commercials in the program and creates a fully automated protocol of the broadcast data.

Based on this data, numerous application-related analyses are generated for the user. In addition to an overview of the broadcast data - how often and when did which station broadcast a certain title - also chart information is offered to our customers. Here, everybody interested receives the current hit list of the music titles played most frequently as well as the broadcast statistics of all chart titles for each station on the chart panel.

Additionally, for each station, those titles are determined the station broadcast most frequently during the last days. Based on this hit list, the station genre is easy to define for example. But the measured data is also used for various other statistics, e. g. for determining the music quota or the share of sound storage media of radio stations. All results may be conveniently accessed via the MusicTrace online portal at any time.

Visit http://www.radiocharts.com to view some of our airplay charts free of charge.

Audio Watermarking Solutions

Audio Watermarking

As the original audio format remains unchanged, audio watermarks are a user-friendly alternative to digital rights management products. The listeners are neither limited in their possibilities nor do they have to purchase special players.

The potential of the watermark technology may be utilized by many different customer groups. Music companies are able to prove their copyright by means of the watermark. Music promotion platforms, in contrast, are offered the possibility to recognize and trace unauthorized circulation of the titles during this particularly critical phase. Music and audio book download shops are able to identify those buyers who made purchased titles accessible to others on file sharing networks.

At present, MusicTrace licenses watermark solutions for uncompressed audio signals, MP3 audio files, and FLAC-coded audio signals. With ContentMarkCD, we furthermore provide a special solution for the creation of watermarked audio CDs, e. g. for the purpose of prerelease distribution.