The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and data platform for developers and media companies. Owned by

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services ...

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 MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

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 digital fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in a music database. Practical u ...

, 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

. In October 2010, The Echo Nest received a $7 million venture financing from

Matrix Partners Matrix (formerly Matrix Partners) is a US-based venture capital investment firm. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Int ...

and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. In March 2014, The Echo Nest was acquired by

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 a ...

techniques. The company also made its data available to developers via an

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

and

open data Open data are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

acoustic fingerprinting library.

Clients

The data powered music solutions for customers such as

MTV MTV (an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable television television channel, channel and the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on ...

Island Def Jam Island Def Jam Music Group (IDJMG) was an American record label group formed on December 31, 1998, by Universal Music Group. Before 2014, IDJMG encompassed labels originally established under the umbrella of Island Records and Def Jam Recording ...

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

, MOG,

Warner Music Group Warner Music Group Corp., commonly abbreviated as WMG, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational entertainment and record label Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in New York City. It is one of the "Record label#M ...

, eMusic,

, Rdio, Clear Channel,

VEVO Vevo LLC ( , an abbreviation for "Video Evolution", stylized in all caps until 2013) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational video hosting service, best known for providing music videos to YouTube. The service is also available ...

Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...

SiriusXM Sirius XM Holdings Inc. is an American broadcasting corporation headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, that provides satellite radio and online radio services operating in the United States. The company was formed by the 2008 merge ...

and Thumbplay.

Spotify

The Echo Nest was acquired on 6 March 2014, by music streaming service

. 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".

References

External links