Leading music intelligence company The Echo Nest announces this morning an high-profile client for its music discovery platform: Microsoft’s Xbox Music. Specifically, the Echo Nest’s Music Discovery and Personalization solution will power Xbox Music Radio.
The Echo Nest has worked with Microsoft before, providing technology underlying the Xbox Web Playlist feature. But Xbox Music Radio is a more basic function, bolted into the platform’s primary navigation, and intended to compete with Pandora, iTunes Music, and all other artist-seeded online radio experiences.
The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese reflected the significance of this business development: “It’s especially exciting because the user experiences we are bringing to market are the product of a developer-centric collaboration, unique to a large company such as MSFT.” In past conversations, Lucchese has told RAIN that Microsoft developers are unusually (for a large tech company with deep resources) agreeable to cooperatively developing The Echo Nest’s API (Application Programming Interface). Inventive “hacking” of the API is what led to the Web Playlist feature, which is unique in our experience.
Xbox Music Radio was introduced as a free desktop feature in June.