Echo Nest is the man behind the Spotify Radio curtain
The Music Genome Project is in some serious trouble. The fancy algorithm behind Pandora is facing an increasingly popular competitor in the form of Echo Nest. The company's "music intelligence platform" and its accompanying API are already powering iHeartRadio and Nokia Music's Mix Radio. Now it's getting baked into the streaming media service du jour -- Spotify. Echo Nest's capable automated mix-making was already available to Spotify users via Echofi, but now the Swedish media company is using the tech as the basis for its updated radio service. Check out the PR after the break for a few not-so-subtle jabs at Pandora and its restrictions on free users.
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The Echo Nest Powers New Spotify Radio
SOMERVILLE, MA, December 16, 2011 - The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter apps across the web and devices, will provide music intelligence to power intelligent radio and radio playlisting within the new Spotify Radio app, which starts rolling out to its users today.
The relationship sees The Echo Nest powering Spotify Radio, which lets users create personalized radio stations based around songs or artists in Spotify's catalogue of around 15 million tracks. The Echo Nest's deep musical intelligence helps Spotify users build playlists dynamically around any song or artist for an amazing radio experience.
"Playlists are the cornerstone of the Spotify user experience," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "The Echo Nest has invested heavily to ensure our intelligent playlist engine is the most sophisticated in the world. Combining The Echo Nest's intelligent playlist engine with Spotify Radio's incredibly intuitive and inherently social service will certainly give Spotify users an amazing music discovery experience."
Ken Parks, Chief Content Officer of Spotify, commented: "We can't wait to hear what our users think of Spotify Radio, which offers unlimited stations and unlimited skips, as it begins rolling out this week. With the help of The Echo Nest's recommendation wizardry and our multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is now a music discovery experience without equal."
Spotify Radio is located within Spotify Apps, which will this week be made available to both users of the free service plus the Unlimited and Premium subscription tiers. Spotify is the most popular music service of its kind in the world, with over 10 million active users and over 2.5 million paying subscribers in 12 countries worldwide.
About The Echo Nest
The Echo Nest powers smarter music applications for leading media companies and thousands of independent developers, with a customer base that reaches over 100 million music fans every month. Over 250 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform. With the world's only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up the largest repository of dynamic music data in the world – over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs -- to help developers re-shape the experience of playing -- and playing with -- music. The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs. Investors include Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.
