The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and
data platform for developers and media companies. Owned by
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...
since 2014,
the company is based in
Somerville,
MA. The Echo Nest began as a research spin-off from the
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music.
Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation,
audio fingerprinting
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.
Practical uses of a ...
, and analysis for consumers and developers.
History
The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan
and Brian Whitman
at the
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
.
In October 2010, The Echo Nest received a $7 million venture financing from
Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners is a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconduct ...
and Commonwealth Capital Ventures.
In March 2014, The Echo Nest was acquired by
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...
for 49.7 million euro, consisting of cash and Spotify's equity.
Products
The Echo Nest's product line was based on their automatically derived database of data about 30 million songs
aggregated from web crawling, data mining, and
digital signal processing
Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are ...
techniques. The company also made its data available to developers via an
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
used by over 7,000 developers
to build independent music applications. The API was shut down on 31 May 2016, and developers were encouraged to use the Spotify API instead.
The Echo Nest released data on 1 million songs for research purposes.
The company was a co-organizer of
Music Hack Day.
In June 2011, the company released Echoprint, an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
and
open data
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
acoustic fingerprinting library.
Clients
The data powered music solutions for customers such as
MTV
MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...
,
Island Def Jam
The Island Def Jam Music Group (IDJMG) was an American recording music unit, formed on New Year's Eve 1998 by the Universal Music Group. It consists of labels devised and consisted under the basic operations of Island Records and Def Jam Recordin ...
,
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
.
. 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.
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.
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 4,341 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify" called Every Noise at Once.
The Echo Nest has created an internal tool for Spotify and Echo Nest employees called The Truffle Pig, which is used in Spotify to curate 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".