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Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

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Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#34

This frightens me. I'm a big Rdio fan and they use Echo Nest as their backend. Has Spotify just found a way to secretly shut them down?

Spotify has said they'll honour all standing business arrangements, so I imagine Rdio will have time to move to another provider or try and bring it in house.

Are any of those arrangements perpetual? Doubtful.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#35
post #32

I hope Spotify acquire last.fm at some point.

Why? How would that help last.fm users?

Last.fm has a great neighbor-based recommendation engine. Combine that with Echo Nest's user-based machine learning approach and Spotify's user base, and you have a pretty robust product

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#36
The fact that so many of these online services are basically using The Echo Nest to build their "music discovery" engines (aka their radio option) is a bit unnerving. What's there to differentiate them if they all use the same methods to pick what song they send you...?

Also shameless plug, I got really tired of Spotify, Pandora, last.fm robotic stations and built (http://www.ssradio.me). 100% NOT powered by Echo Nest.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#37
post #22

This frightens me. I'm a big Rdio fan and they use Echo Nest as their backend. Has Spotify just found a way to secretly shut them down?

I've been working on a project where I'm building my own 'Echo Nest' type of API to feed it. I didn't want to rely on their API since I felt I could offer something better/different. With it, I have been slowly putting together a new music discovery site ( http://www.musicplexer.com ) It's extremely incomplete at the time, but I'm still building the API the hard way: scraping, analyzing the data, connecting the diffe…

Does Echo Nest have any patents in the area of analysis?

That would be my concern about this deal. Not just for you, but for the whole area. I hope this doesn't become more grist for our borked software patent system, wherein this deal mostly benefits only West Texas lawyers and their car dealers and realtors.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#38
Really happy for these guys. :) I consulted with Norwest for technical due diligence during the last fundraising round[1], and was super impressed with what this team has built. Audio classification at scale is a really difficult thing to get right.

They're also one of the few companies who have successfully navigated the minefield of the music business, which takes a painstaking amount of focus and determination. But above all, they created a remarkable service to powering the next-generation of music experiences. Spotify seems like an obvious fit (especially given the Spotify Platform[2]), and I'm really excited to see where they go next.

As an aside, The Echo Nest has been a huge supporter of the start/tech scene in Boston. For 5 years now they organized "Music Hack Day"[3] which brought together musicians and engineers to build fun projects. Here's hoping they keep it up!

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/12/echo-nest-...

[2] https://developer.spotify.com/

[3] http://blog.echonest.com/post/66776489063/the-echo-nests-5th...

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#40

I hope Spotify acquire last.fm at some point.

Why? So they can ruin Last.fm's recommendations with crap music spam in the same way as their own discovery?

Last.fm's integration could be better, but then again most inline apps could be better, so I suspect that is a Spotify issue.

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