The Echo Nest launches new ad-targeting product

In a dramatic extension of its core data intelligence business, The Echo Nest has announced a music advertising product that gives ad networks, and music services, audience segmenting possibilities. The solution is called Music Audience Understanding. Keying off The Echo Nest’s music context technology, the new platform uses sophisticated music preference knowledge to predict “high-value demographic and psychographic advertising segments,” according to the press release.

The product launch is paired with a partnership announcement: TargetSpot, the largest digital audio ad network, will use the technology to more precisely match ads to user type, and gain insights about how an advertiser’s target audience consumes music.

This interesting technology angle counters Pandora’s recently-deployed audience segmentation, which is based on user registration details refined by music choices. The Echo Nest is a data-crunching enterprise at heart, providing a multi-faceted music recommendation brain to hundreds of listening platforms, with an API (Application Programming Interface) that enables unique product development.

The company’s leadership in the field has given it outsize influence on how music services sound to millions of users. The new Music Audience Understanding product seeks to influence how advertisers address those users, and the user experience of hearing ads that potentially are more relevant and interesting to them.

From a high-altitude view of the listening landscape that includes AM/FM, these emerging audience segmentation and targeting solutions, paired with reporting of actionable results, seek to give Internet radio ventures a key competitive advantage over broadcast.