Spotify loses a top Echo Nest data scientist
Brian Whitman has departed Spotify. He joined the streaming company as a co-founder and CTO of The Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014. Continue Reading
The Echo Nest
Spotify’s Sort Your Music app uses data to explore, restructure playlists
Review by Anna Washenko
Data is the big buzzword of the moment, and a new web app from Spotify is putting a slice of that information trove in the hands of listeners. The web app is called Sort Your Music. It lets you look at any playlist in Spotify, then shuffle the order based on the various musical traits. Continue Reading
Quick Hits: Prince criticizes U2; GigaOM discusses pre-1972 debate; Spotify holds artist info sessions; Echo Nest profile
Brief news items and worthy reads from around the Internet: Prince criticizes U2; do lawsuits for pre-1972 royalties threaten digital music?; Spotify’s semi-secret info sessions; what’s up at The Echo Nest. Continue Reading
Where is the (musical) drama? Big data answers
Monday distraction: Paul Lamere, Director of Development Platform at The Echo Nest, which is owned by Spotify, has created an entertaining hack that anyone can try — Where Is the Drama? The idea is to use waveform analysis to identify a song’s climactic section. The experiment is fun, if nothing else. Read how Lamere accomplished this hack, and where you can test it. Continue Reading
Avoiding music: The amazing metrics of song-skipping
Song-skipping is a persuasive feature of personalized radio and on-demand services, driving about 50 percent of user, according to one study. Paul Lamere, director of the developer platform at The Echo Nest (now part of Spotify), analyzed millions of users and billions of song plays to tease out how quickly and often we skip songs. Continue Reading
Big Data Is Smart Data for Online Audio
Big data, the term used for collections of data that are so big that special processing is needed in order to use it, is a key component of customized music services. Big data processing is important on the advertising side as well. Jennifer Lane thinks about the possibilities that big data can offer to streaming audio. Continue Reading
Rhapsody and Napster the latest services to jettison The Echo Nest
The exodus of high-profile music services from music-technology provider The Echo Nest picked up momentum today as music service Rhapsody and its subsidiary Napster announced that they will “wind down” their partnerships. They join Rdio, which peeled away from The Echo Nest soon after it was acquired by competitor Spotify. Continue Reading
Rdio will terminate its relationship with The Echo Nest
In what could be described as the first crack in The Echo Nest’s music-powering empire, Rdio CEO Anthony Bay told CNBC that his music service would end its relationship with the music-data company. The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify last week, and Bay doesn’t want his user metrics visible to a competitor. Continue Reading
A talk with The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese about the Spotify acquisition
The acquisition of The Echo Nest by Spotify represents an important potential alteration in the anatomy of streaming music services. The Echo Nest has a broad footprint in the industry, we wondered what the acquisition means for the many music services which rely on The Echo Nest, and their millions of users users, who, even if they don’t know it, are really listening to The Echo Nest. Continue Reading
Spotify acquires The Echo Nest
In joint press release, Spotify and The Echo Nest announced this morning that Spotify has acquired The Echo Nest. Spotify is a leading interactive, on-demand music service. The Echo Nest is the leading music intelligence tech company, providing technology that powers song recommendations to over 400 listening platforms. Continue Reading
Gracenote adds a partner to its Rhythm project
At the top of the new year we reported that Gracenote was moving into a new dimension of music intelligence with a new project called Gracenote Rhythm. Today Gracenote announced a partnership with Next Big Sound, which measures music consumption trends. Continue Reading
Gracenote leaps into The Echo Nest space with Gracenote Rhythm
Today, Gracenote announced a new developer product called Gracenote Rhythm, which competes directly with The Echo Nest, whose music intelligence technology powers over 400 services. How will the two companies differentiate? Continue Reading