People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged. Echo Nest is a set of mus

People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged. Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal modes, and other features best thought of as compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into a similarity space because there's few enough parameters. It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do machine listening on the raw audio. Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into music recommendation.