The 4FriendsOnly.com Internet Technologies AG is participating in GlobalMusic2one's development of a cutting-edge program for music analysis which aims to significantly facilitate online searches as well as marketing for musical works.

GlobalMusic2one is a two-year research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) as part of the „KMU-Innovativ” program since November 2008. Through this project, the BMBF is supporting the music industry in its endeavour to take part in the development of technological innovations which aim at economic utilization. This group's technology experts are the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), Bach Technology GmbH and 4FriendsOnly.com Internet Technologies AG, all of which are based in Ilmenau/Thuringia. The music industry is represented by Berlin's Piranha Musik & IT AG. Its IT-Director Stephan Siedler comments, „with this project, we're taking an innovative, pro-active position to confront the sweeping changes and challenges facing music businesses today”.

The project's outcome will be an adaptive software program which users "train" by adding new musical categories and then assigning example songs. The software thereby gradually "learns" to recognize various musical qualities and relationships. Thus, GlobalMusic2one will be able to analyse recordings by identifying the respective musical qualities (for example genre, tempo, mood) and thereafter assign each recording to the appropriate categories. New content is efficiently, precisely and, above all, automatically entered into databanks.

The global music market is characterized by its multifarious regional styles, dynamically developing trends and numerous, as yet undiscovered, niches. The music business must cater to continuously changing customer wishes, defined regionally, culturally and by age groups. And this is exactly why the music industry so urgently needs expanded, automated systems for categorization and recommendation. GlobalMusic2one's software will help the industry enrich its musical offerings with an unlimited number of tag words and definitions atop of a basis of musicological concepts and metadata information, leading to optimal marketing through online music portals worldwide. Users of this new software will discover that their quotas of hits through internet searches are significantly higher.

The development of the GlobalMusic2one software system is based on already existing pieces, such as the Fraunhofer IDMT's automated musical analysis software „GenreID / Soundslike” which uses state-of-the-art music information retrieval (MIR) technologies. This software is being further developed and interconnected with interactive elements from web 2.0 such as tagging, the assignment by users of catchwords for the description of content. The entirety of all assigned tags represents a continuously expanding musical knowledge base that shall be exploited to improve the quality of automatic searches on a semantic level. The realm of semantics represents one of the most important aspects of a future web 3.0. This hybrid approach - the combination of music analysis with web 2.0 technology and the "semantic web" - is what distinguishes GlobalMusic2one.

GlobalMusic2one will first be tested on project partners' already existing music portals such as Piranha Musik & IT's MusicScout and virtualWOMEX as well as on the PotatoSystem, developed by 4FriendsOnly.com AG in cooperation with Fraunhofer IDMT. Thereafter GlobalMusic2one will be marketed to other portal operators worldwide.