I once worked for Gracenote, and even I will say that it's untrue that *all* iTunes data comes from Gracenote. I don't believe that you were misled, but rather I think you or the person you spoke to may misunderstand. By "search" they probably assumed you meant "CD lookup"; in Gracenote parlance, a "lookup" is a type of "search". With respect to CD lookup, all the iTunes data comes from Gracenote. As for the iTunes store, that's Apple's own data. When music is submitted to the store for sale by the rights holders, they provide the metadata to Apple for use in the store. Cover art downloaded by iTunes, I believe, comes from AMG.

This is basically the only music metadata supplied by Apple/iTunes. It is misleading to say metadata "in iTunes" comes from other sources - it doesn't. The metadata in your *music* may come from any source you choose, if you rip/buy using something other than iTunes or the iTunes store. Implying that iTunes uses freedb as a data source simply because you can import songs tagged by some other app with freedb data is misleading at best. FUD at its finest.

Gracenote has stated in its press release that it will be run as a separate entity from Sony. It should be no stretch to understand why. Undermining customer relationships to further some competitive agenda on Sony's part would potentially be very damaging. Anyone can license CD technology, or Bluray, etc, be they Sony competitor or not. Why should Gracenote technology be any different?