Billboard.com’s Music Search Portal for

Billboard.com’s Music Search Portal for Professionals, for $49.95 a Month: Billboard.com will launch a music search portal, powered by technology from Broadjam. The portal, called Billboard SongSearch, will launch in the first quarter of 2003. Broadjam employs a team of editors who manually listen to all the song collections from say a specific music publisher and encode these songs according to various criterions, such as song genre, beats per minute, publisher, lyric content, similar artists, era, tempo, key, and language. These songs, along with the relevant criteria, are then developed into a database, which can then search by music professionals through this Web-based interface, along with other information on copyright use and license fee.

Subscribers to Billboard SongSearch will pay $49.95 per month to gain access to details on specific songs, including copyright ownership and publisher information. The Billboard SongSearch site will also integrate Billboard’s music chart archive, which dates back to 1955, for comprehensive research.

Billboard.com and Broadjam plan to have partnerships with all of the major and independent publishers. Additionally, independent musicians and songwriters will be able to upload their music to the site.

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