Maidenhead, UK. June 22, 2010 - Rovi Corporation (NASDAQ: ROVI) announced today that it has expanded the Rovi Music data service to 33 different countries in Europe, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. The new country specific datasets are an enhancement to the current Rovi Music offering broadening its global coverage to more than 2.5 million albums, 23.5 million tracks and close to 2 million pieces of cover art. With this new information included, Rovi Music contains one of the largest collections of country specific music data.
In the UK, trends continue to prove that music collections are moving into the cloud as 2009 revenues from physical format music sales fell 6.1 percent to £739.9 million, continuing the downward trend for the sixth year in succession. Digital income now makes up a fifth of total recorded music revenues - up 47.8 percent to £188.9 million, according to the UK music trade organisation, The BPI.
Helping to facilitate the purchase of digital content, Rovi Music today powers many of the online websites and consumer electronics devices that have revolutionised the music industry. With this offering, businesses can enhance their product offering with extensive relational links from Rovi to enable easy discovery and navigation. Rovi Music streamlines the data delivery process by integrating high quality, consistent information designed to inform and influence consumers as they discover and experience digital music.
“The uptake of digital music has quickly taken off across the world, and people’s collections of music in their homes are continuing to grow tremendously," said John Moakley, executive vice president of Data Services for Rovi Corporation. "When consumers are searching for music for a particular occasion or just to suit their mood - in a collection of one hundred to five hundred to a thousand songs – data about their digital files becomes essential. Rovi Music offers businesses the ability to deliver a better, personalised music experience to their customers."
Rovi Music provides data in many different forms to support a variety of devices and services across online, service provider, and consumer electronic platforms, such as websites, social networking sites, mobile, PC and embedded applications. Data from Rovi Music comes in short-form, like headlines and product descriptions that are optimized for CE, portable and mobile device types and applications.
In addition to basic music data, Rovi Music offers enhanced information such as biographies, reviews, imagery and other related content. The new Rovi Music data for Europe includes the translations of nearly 1300 different descriptors into 17 different languages to enable albums and tracks to be associated with genres, mood, themes, and other information that categorizes content for searching and/or creating playlists. To promote quality, the content is managed by a global team of in-house musicologists at Rovi who constantly update, review and refresh the data.
Rovi Music is a part of the Rovi Data Solutions offering, a vast database of information on CDs, songs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, games, books, TV shows, sports and awards that also includes cover art, reviews, celebrity biographies, rich media and more.
About Rovi Corporation
Rovi Corporation is focused on revolutionizing the digital entertainment landscape by delivering solutions that enable consumers to intuitively connect to new entertainment from many sources and locations. The company also provides extensive entertainment discovery solutions for television, movies, music and photos to its customers in the consumer electronics, cable and satellite, entertainment and online distribution markets. These solutions, complemented by industry leading entertainment data, create the connections between people and technology, and enable them to discover and manage entertainment in an enjoyable form.
Rovi holds over 4,400 issued or pending patents worldwide and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with numerous offices across the United States and around the world including Japan, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. More information about Rovi can be found at www.rovicorp.com.
