The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and data platform for developers and media companies. Owned by Spotify since 2014,[3] the company is based in Somerville, MA. The Echo Nest began as a research spin-off from the MIT Media Lab to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music. Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers.[4]

History

The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan[1] and Brian Whitman[2] at the MIT Media Lab.

Spotify

The Echo Nest was acquired on 6 March 2014, by music streaming service Spotify. The music intelligence agency functions to help Spotify curate personalized music recommendations that are driven by algorithms. The Echo Nest is the driving force behind the playlists professionally curated on Spotify. To generate individualized Discover Weekly playlists as well as recommend suggestions in the 'Discover' section of Spotify's home page, individualized for every subscriber, the Echo Nest collects data on a user's listening habits and uses it to predict what music they will enjoy the most.[18]

The Echo Nest has created Taste Profiles based on the listening patterns they notice about a user. Taste Profiles are an amalgamation of taste clusters of genres and subgenres. Taste Profiles and clusters are not publicly available for individual users to access but have been released to journalists and researchers.[19]

An Echo Nest employee, Glenn McDonald, has created a categorical perception spectrum of genres and subgenres based on "an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 4,341 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify" called Every Noise at Once.[20]

The Echo Nest has created an internal tool for Spotify and Echo Nest employees called The Truffle Pig, which is used in Spotify to curate mood and occasion specific playlists. The Truffle Pig is a sonically advanced search engine that can be asked to search for songs based on adjectives or feelings. The search can also be redacted for particular qualities to produce higher levels of specificity. Playlists curated by Spotify are available for public access. They are created in part by the algorithms associated with The Truffle Pig and in part by the music experts employed by Spotify. To create these playlists, one of Spotify's thirty-two resident music experts will use the Truffle Pig search engine to find songs associated with a quality or theme. From the search results, the employee can hand pick songs perfect for any playlist. These playlists include "Your Favorite Coffeehouse" and "TGIF".[21]

type	Subsidiary
founder	Tristan Jehan‡R1R‡ Brian Whitman‡R2R‡
location city	Somerville, MA
location country	United States
key people	Tristan Jehan (co-Founder & CTO) Brian Whitman (co-Founder & CTO) Jim Lucchese (CEO)
industry	Music
products	Music intelligence platform
parent	Spotify

History

Products

Clients

Spotify

See also

External links

References