If you ask me, this pretty much looks like a merger/roll-up. Two of the music and content meta-data companies Gracenote and Muze have formed a multi-year partnership to work on a comprehensive solution. The partnership will combine Muze’s meta-content on album art, album reviews and artist biographies with Gracenote’s music identification technology and information database (CDDB, mainly).

The two companies will offer the solution to consumer electronics and mobile phone devices, as well as PC applications.

My guess: Why didn’t the two companies just merge? It probably has to do with the messy ownership structure of both the companies. Anyway, this leaves only the troubled AMG in competition...what that also means that this is a field where a lot of innovation and opportunities still lies untapped, so you will see new entrants in the field.

Anyway, Gracenote has also released couple of new solutions at CES: a new music recommendation engine and a speech recognition solution for hands-free control of music collections.

I’m surely going to hear from the companies..oh boy...