The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest Ltd. (Spotify)
Subsidiary
Industry Music
Founded June 2005[1]
Founder Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman
Headquarters Somerville, MA, USA
Key people
 Tristan Jehan (co-Founder & CTO), Brian Whitman (co-Founder & CTO), Jim Lucchese (CEO)[2]
Products Music intelligence platform
Owner Spotify
Number of employees
 65[1]
Website the.echonest.com

The Echo Nest was an audio fingerprinting service for developers and media companies. Based in Somerville, MA, the Echo Nest was a research spin-off from the MIT Media Lab to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music.[3] Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers.[4]

On March 6, 2014 Spotify announced that they had acquired The Echo Nest.[5]

History

The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan[6] and Brian Whitman[7] at the MIT Media Lab.

In October 2010, The Echo Nest received a $7 million venture financing from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures[4][8]

In July 2012 The Echo Nest received a $17.3 million Series D venture financing from Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Jim Pallotta [1]

In March 2014, The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify for an undisclosed amount.[9]

Products

The Echo Nest's product line was based on their automatically-derived database of data about 30 million songs[3] aggregated from web crawling, data mining, and digital signal processing techniques. The company also made its data available to developers via an API[10] used by over 7,000 developers[2] to build independent music applications. The Echo Nest released data on 1 million songs for research purposes.[11] The company was a co-organizer of Music Hack Day.[12]

In June 2011, the company released Echoprint, an open source and open data acoustic fingerprinting library.[13]

Clients

The data powered music solutions for customers such as MTV,[14] Island Def Jam,[15] BBC,[16] MOG, Warner Music Group, eMusic,[17] Spotify, Rdio, Clear Channel, VEVO, Nokia and Thumbplay.[2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 CrunchBase (22 March 2011). "The Echo Nest". CrunchBase.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 The Echo Nest. "About Us - The Company".
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 David Zax (4 March 2011). "The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio". Fast Company.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Boston Globe (5 October 2010). "The Echo Nest secures $7m in financing". The Boston Globe.
  5. ↑ Spotify (6 March 2014). "Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest". Spotify.
  6. ↑ Tristan Jehan. "Tristan Jehan". MIT Media Lab.
  7. ↑ Brian Whitman. "Brian Whitman". MIT Media Lab.
  8. ↑ Leena Rao (5 October 2010). "The Echo Nest Raises $7 Million For Music Personalization Platform". TechCrunch.
  9. ↑ "Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest".
  10. ↑ "Echo Nest API Overview".
  11. ↑ Matthew Lasar (8 March 2011). "Million-song dataset: take it, it's free". Ars Technica.
  12. ↑ Anthony Bruno (1 April 2011). "Q&A: The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese". Billboard.
  13. ↑ Stuart Dredge (23 June 2011). "Make your own Shazam? There's an API for that called Echoprint". The Guardian (London).
  14. ↑ Sam Gustin (14 December 2010). "MTV Unveils New Music Discovery Website". Wired.
  15. ↑ Brenna Ehrlich (2 February 2011). "Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers". Mashable.
  16. ↑ Mini Swamy (28 December 2010). "Echo Nest Enables BBC to Deliver Unique Musical Content". TMCnet.
  17. ↑ Paul Sawers. "eMusic to Launch Echo Nest Powered Smart Music Discovery Apps".

External links