The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest Ltd. (Spotify)
Subsidiary
Industry Music
Founded June 2005 (2005-06)[1]
Founder Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman
Headquarters Somerville, MA, United States
Key people
 Tristan Jehan (co-Founder & CTO), Brian Whitman (co-Founder & CTO), Jim Lucchese (CEO)[2]
Products Music intelligence platform
Owner Spotify
Number of employees
 65[1]
Website the.echonest.com

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and data platform for developers and media companies. Based in Somerville, MA, the Echo Nest was a research spin-off from the MIT Media Lab to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music.[3] Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers.[4]

On March 6, 2014 Spotify announced that they had acquired The Echo Nest.[5]

History

The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan[6] and Brian Whitman[7] at the MIT Media Lab.

In October 2010, The Echo Nest received a $7 million venture financing from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures.[4][8]

In July 2012 The Echo Nest received a $17.3 million Series D venture financing from Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Jim Pallotta.[1]

In March 2014, The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify for an undisclosed amount.[9]

Products

The Echo Nest's product line was based on their automatically-derived database of data about 30 million songs[3] aggregated from web crawling, data mining, and digital signal processing techniques. The company also made its data available to developers via an API[10] used by over 7,000 developers[2] to build independent music applications. The API was shut down on May 31, 2016 and developers were encouraged to use the Spotify API instead.[11]

The Echo Nest released data on 1 million songs for research purposes.[12] The company was a co-organizer of Music Hack Day.[13]

In June 2011, the company released Echoprint, an open source and open data acoustic fingerprinting library.[14]

Clients

The data powered music solutions for customers such as MTV,[15] Island Def Jam,[16] BBC,[17] MOG, Warner Music Group, eMusic,[18] Spotify, Rdio, Clear Channel, VEVO, Nokia and Thumbplay.[2]

Spotify

The Echo Nest was acquired on March 6, 2014 by music streaming service Spotify. The music intelligence agency functions to help Spotify curate personalized music recommendations that are driven by algorithms. The Echo Nest is the driving force behind the playlists professionally curated on Spotify. To generate individualized Discover Weekly playlists as well as recommend suggestions in the ‘Discover’ section of Spotify’s home page, individualized for every subscriber, the Echo Nest collects data on a user’s listening habits and uses it to predict what music they will enjoy the most.[19]

The Echo Nest has created Taste Profiles based on the listening patterns they notice about a user. Taste Profiles are an amalgamation of taste clusters of genres and subgenres. Taste Profiles and clusters are not publicly available for individual users to access but have been released to journalists and researchers.[20]

One Echo Nest employee has created a categorical perception spectrum of genres and subgenres based on “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1461 genres by Spotify” called Every Noise At Once.[21]

The Echo Nest has also created an internal tool for Spotify and Echo Nest employees called The Truffle Pig, which is Spotify curates mood and occasion specific playlists. The Truffle Pig is a sonically advanced search engine that can be asked to search for songs based on adjectives or feelings. The search can also be redacted for particular qualities to produce higher levels of specificity. Playlists curated by Spotify are available for public access. They are created in part by the algorithms associated with The Truffle Pig and in part by the music experts employed by Spotify. To create these playlists, one of Spotify’s thirty-two resident music experts will use the Truffle Pig search engine to find songs associated with a quality or theme. From the search results, the employee can hand pick songs perfect for any playlist. These playlists include “Your Favorite Coffeehouse” and “TGIF”.[22]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 CrunchBase (22 March 2011). "The Echo Nest". CrunchBase.
  2. 1 2 3 The Echo Nest. "About Us - The Company".
  3. 1 2 David Zax (4 March 2011). "The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio". Fast Company.
  4. 1 2 Boston Globe (5 October 2010). "The Echo Nest secures $7m in financing". The Boston Globe.
  5. ↑ Spotify (6 March 2014). "Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest". Spotify.
  6. ↑ Tristan Jehan. "Tristan Jehan". MIT Media Lab.
  7. ↑ Brian Whitman. "Brian Whitman". MIT Media Lab.
  8. ↑ Leena Rao (5 October 2010). "The Echo Nest Raises $7 Million For Music Personalization Platform". TechCrunch.
  9. ↑ "Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest".
  10. ↑ "Echo Nest API Overview".
  11. ↑ Important API Announcement, March 29th 2016
  12. ↑ Matthew Lasar (8 March 2011). "Million-song dataset: take it, it's free". Ars Technica.
  13. ↑ Anthony Bruno (1 April 2011). "Q&A: The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese". Billboard.
  14. ↑ Stuart Dredge (23 June 2011). "Make your own Shazam? There's an API for that called Echoprint". The Guardian. London.
  15. ↑ Sam Gustin (14 December 2010). "MTV Unveils New Music Discovery Website". Wired.
  16. ↑ Brenna Ehrlich (2 February 2011). "Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers". Mashable.
  17. ↑ Mini Swamy (28 December 2010). "Echo Nest Enables BBC to Deliver Unique Musical Content". TMCnet.
  18. ↑ Paul Sawers. "eMusic to Launch Echo Nest Powered Smart Music Discovery Apps".
  19. ↑ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/spotify-knows-me-better-than-i-know-myself/
  20. ↑ http://www.techinsider.io/inside-spotify-and-the-future-of-music-streaming
  21. ↑ http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
  22. ↑ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/spotify-perfect-playlist/
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