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Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine
- transpy 13y agoThis is very interesting, correct me if I'm wrong, but Spotify was one of the power users of echo nest's APIs. Maybe they had to use it so much that they had to acquire it.
- untog 13y agoCorrect - IIRC their entire Radio feature is powered by The Echo Nest.
- anonymoushn 13y agoI'm sad to hear this, since the Radio feature is pretty bad. I guess that means losing The Echo Nest is no big deal, though.
- whopa 13y agoRdio also uses The Echo Nest for their radio feature, and it's great. I always chalked up Spotify's radio sucking vs. Rdio's radio being so good due to Spotify having shitty integration with The Echo Nest... maybe that will change. One thing that always struck me about Spotify is that they never seemed to put a priority on anything around actual music discovery.
- rot13 13y agoThat may have been the case at one point, but Spotify has used their own recommendation system for a while. http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Pandora-radio-is-built-on-their-music-genome-project-How-does-Spotify-program-their-radio-stations http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Pandora-radio-is-built-on-their...
- mpnordland 13y agoIf so, then the radio won't really improve. I prefer Pandora, but I can't get that now in my country.
- mattgreenrocks 13y agoNot surprising at all. Echo Nest does a great job solving a not-easy problem. Hope they remain accessible to the public afterwards.
- maxerickson 13y agoOne of the technical people at Echo Nest writes some pretty interesting posts about music and how they analyze it. He mentions the acquisition today: http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=399 http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=399
- r721 13y agoThe Echo Nest blog announcement: http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-joins-spotify http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-join...
- untog 13y agoThere's a separate thread discussing the actual Echo Nest post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7353874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7353874
- antocv 13y agoSpotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Like Carthage, it is my opinion that Spotify and the music /industry/ founded on copy-theft must be burned down.
- untog 13y agoSpotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Care to expand on what you mean by that? I'll agree with you that the music industry is deeply messed up, but it has been for a very long time. If anything services like Spotify will allow artists to abandon parasitic record labels and release material by themselves.
- saaaaaam 13y agoPeople halo around the most visible artists. The various services promote the most popular artists, because that's what their audience wants. As the model shifts from a lean forward (I buy music that I like, so that I can listen to it) to a lean back (curated, data/discovery) model the top line hook for fairly un-engaged music consumers means that they discover less new music and hear more of what they expect to hear. Which is exactly what happened to radio, for exactly the same commercial reasons, over the past couple of decades.
- andyhmltn 13y agoReally? Because I have used Spotify for 2+ years and I discover a lot of new music through it. Not the kind of stuff that I find on the radio either. Being able to start a 'radio' with a specific song brings out some great stuff you wouldn't of found before
- antocv 13y agosaaaaam and others under the top parent comment have provided really good answers. Spotify is the parasitic record label, they're owned and in their command. Ill never miss a chance to point out the hypocrisy of spotify, which was founded on piracy, its initial load of mp3s came from dc++ and thepiratebay.
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- darylfritz 13y agoThis 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?
- hadem 13y agoThis was my very first thought as well. I worry they will close it as well. Perhaps they will charge for to use the service in the future?
- goatforce5 13y agoRdio's recently launched Stations feature (complete with "Powered by echonest" logo in the corner) is brilliant. It'll be a real shame if it goes away.
- andrewcooke 13y agoi use their api to construct my own playlists and am worried too...
- aaronmoodie 13y agoOr any other new music startup for that matter. I agree, this is a little disconcerting.
- jggonz 13y agoI'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 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 different sources, and making sense of how it will all go together. The end result for Musicplexer will be something more than bop.fm, spotify, pandora, etc... I am planning some differentiating features that I don't want to discuss yet! :) Btw, it's built with Meteor/MongoDB & Mojolicious + EC2/DigitalOcean And... if enough people visit it, it'll probably die. ;)
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- whirlycott1 13y agoCongrats Brian, Tristan and Jim!
- diydsp 13y agoYes, a good example of sticking with an idea and growing it slowly and steadily for years and years and years! Also, of pivoting and sticking to business-to-business solutions. Earlier on, their projects involved creative remixing of music, but they extinguished them in favor of supporting other businesses [1]. We should all take a cue from them! [1] But there is still lots of creativity which takes place at their hackathons! http://blog.echonest.com/post/69095723329/automatic-music-hackathon-music-that-plays-itself http://blog.echonest.com/post/69095723329/automatic-music-ha...
- transpy 13y agoI had just started to dabble with python and echo nest (the remix API if I remember correctly) and now I wonder if their system will still be available or if now it is going to be proprietary/closed.
- radley 13y agoI figure as long as Paul Lamere is around it will stay open.
- citricsquid 13y agoI hope Spotify acquire last.fm at some point.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- slazaro 13y agoI hope they don't. Last.fm is an app inside Spotify right now, and scrobbling is integrated. All I wish they did is better integration (love tracks, recommendations coming from last.fm instead of whatever they have, etc.), all of which can be done without having to buy last.fm. Last.fm as a standalone service for discovery is good as it is.
- maxerickson 13y agoDo you think CBS is interested in selling it?
- aggronn 13y agoWhy? How would that help last.fm users?
- roguelynn 13y agoHave you seen this? http://www.last.fm/hardware/spotify http://www.last.fm/hardware/spotify
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- mox1 13y agoThe 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 http://www.ssradio.me). 100% NOT powered by Echo Nest.
- acjohnson55 13y agoIt depends. EchoNest has a similar track feature for any given track, which could trivially be used for playlisting. But it also provides an incredible amount of data. There are countless ways you could create different playlisting algorithms with their APIs.
- grinich 13y agoReally 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-raises-17-million-for-big-data-analysis-of-music/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/12/echo-nest-... [2] https://developer.spotify.com/ https://developer.spotify.com/ [3] http://blog.echonest.com/post/66776489063/the-echo-nests-5th-music-hack-day-boston-was-a-roaring http://blog.echonest.com/post/66776489063/the-echo-nests-5th...
- radley 13y agoBut now they're just "Nextflix data". Let's revisit in a few years and see how open they still are.
- julesbond007 13y agoOh wow! These guys are in Davis Square in Somerville not far from me...I've been working on some idea about the same thing for 4 years now...back then people would laugh at the idea because Pandora was already there. But now?
- daturkel 13y agoI was a QA intern at Echo Nest in Somerville over the summer and was super surprised to see this today! They're a really a fantastic and fun group of people and doing incredible work, having a fun time while they do it. (Speaking, naturally, only my own opinions here:) I'm excited for the possibilities of growth that it'll offer the company, but also a little nervous about how it'll affect the Nest's ability to serve their other (previous?) clients. I personally signed on with Rdio because I loved the deep Echo Nest integration—I hope that's not going anywhere. Looking hopefully, but anxiously, towards the future.
- noname123 13y agoHi, I'm curious what are the other applications of Echo Nest API besides music recommendation? Can it assist composers or performance artists in composition? (e.g., input scores of Charlie Parker, output a solo on key of X based on previous known solo's). Can it identify harmonic structures in music? (e.g., which mode is used in song X and in a composition, when a key is changed). I also live in the greater Boston area and has always viewed EchoNest with curiosity, so very curious what you can do with their API other than their "acoustic fingerprinting" (e.g., genre/bpm/key/mood/color etc.)
- sebastianwolff 13y agoNope, though you may be interested in David Cope and Experiments in Musical Intelligence. Input Bach MIDIs, receive 500 compositions in the style of Bach. Turing complete. Echo Nest has a few other fun features, like danceability, mood, tempo, and others. An API playground, too, for now.
- diydsp 13y agoThe API has some excellent stuff regarding audio segmentation. It represents any track as a list of ~2,000 segments. Each segment has energy in 12 chromatic bins measured, too. There's also information on beat times, and a Machine-Learning-based estimate of verse/chorus/solo and even more great stuff like that. Full on auto-transcription like you hint at is a hard AI problem, like speech recognition, which will never by fully solved (according to me), but I, for one, would LOVE to see a musical editor enhanced by EchoNest metadata. One of these days, i'll add to to Audacity hahaha. BTW, if you are in Boston area, come to the Music-Tech meetup. It's a "gem" and I'll be happy to intro you to the EN API (I worked there 6 years ago as a consultant).
- saaaaaam 13y agoI think this is a disaster. It's an awful, hideous, stupid (stupid for the wider industry) defensive acquisition on Spotify's part, paid for, presumably largely, by stock - I doubt they really have the cash to buy companies of the scale of The Echonest, who have taken close to $30m in investment. It destroys value in The Echonest - and every other non-consumer-facing music service out there. The beauty of The Echonest was that they DIDN'T sell to punters. And now, they've been bought in a deal paid for (assumption on my part) with made up value, based on an exit some time soon. It's basically a huge signal that Spotify is preparing for an IPO, which will help the major labels (considerable stock holders - and stake holders) realise a return on their early 'in-faith' investment in Spotify - which has been massively rewarded by unbelievable ($100m+) catalogue advances and equity. Streaming doesn't make money. It will - one day - but right now, there is no certainty that Spotify will come out on top, or even as a player in this space in five years, ten years, whatever. The whole streaming thing has been the biggest wholesale transfer of capital from investors to labels that the music industry has ever seen. Spotify is now "too big to fail". The advances the labels have taken, and the equity they have been given means that it is near impossible for them to let the streaming model of doing business fail. Even if it's currently cannibalistic of their other revenue, and even if there's a huge PR backlash from artists who don't understand that consumption models have changed. The Majors have been given enough actual cash that they can afford to stick it out. The Echonest is one of the most exciting companies - if not THE most exciting company - in the music space today. They've taken approaching $30m of funding, and I have no idea what Spotify had to pay for a company who are presumably fighting off acquisition on a day by day basis from people who want to become players in the music industry. There are about ten buyers I can imagine would have wanted to beat the highest bidder. Beats bought Topspin yesterday. A completely pointless acquisition, based, presumably, on Ian Rodgers' history with that company. Today, Spotify announce their acquisition of The Echonest. Neither company has ANYTHING exciting - on a day to day basis - to report (woo! new interface! woo! more shit headphones! woo! an artist partnership! which our competitors announce tomorrow! woo!) - and apart from the lacklustre launch of Beats earlier in the year, no one in that space has had anything exciting to report in ages. Streaming music is BORING. It's now pretty much just a commodity service, and it's becoming a very dull market, where the major players have nothing to distinguish themselves. The land grab is over, it's about who can sign what partnerships (people talked about Metcalfe's law with Whatsapp, but there's something similar at play here now - how can we partner with to bring massive numbers of consumers to our service? The landscape changes after Nokia and BOinc fucked that one up, but it won't be long before operators/ISPs try to get back in that game as partners rather than providers...) CURATION! DISCOVERY! ACCESS! It's boring as hell. How do you announce something and get some press attention? - buy something that IS exciting! We're looking at a race to the bottom. Spotify have two or three options with The Echonest; leave it as it is and let it power their competitors discovery engines; take it in house, shut it down for everyone else, and steal a brief competitive march on the other guys; absorb it, keep it as it is, but charge shitloads for the API to other services, generating a real (non-consumer) revenue stream for the company. Any of these, though, it's just sad. Music streaming is not innovation - it's reached the point that it is just another commoditised service now, and very soon we'll be at the stage that consumers just don't care where their music comes from; it will just be another bundled offering from infrastructure services (mobile, TV, ISP), or businesses like Netflix and Amazon, who are destroying conventional content payment models from the outside in. iTunes Radio, anyone? iOS carplay launched ONLY with audio partners, and iTunes want to steal that market 100%. Absolutely and without doubt, when Amazon Prime bundles in a streaming service, I will cancel my existing streaming provider contract - because, unlike Lovefilm vs Netflix, there is absolutely no catalogue differentiation. If you're streaming music, you stream ALL the music, not a bit of it - and that is the way services have been built, not least because of the way the whole digital supply chain in music works. You can't have a BIT of the catalogue - you have all of it. The labels (hello, TV & film studios - wake up!) saw this very early on (or, at least, very early on in this part of the emerging narrative) - the more people who supply their content, the better, and the more money they and the rights holders make. There are a few really exciting companies for whom The Echonest would have been a perfect target - people with brilliantly complementary data sets that could dovetail with their business. To sell out to an uncertain-futured company like Spotify is just sad. Sigh.
- iambatman 13y agoI think it's crazy that echonest still doesn't have any album information in their api, for building anything to do with music when is album info not useful?
- acjohnson55 13y agoMaybe they don't want to duplicate the effort of MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is about warehousing preexisting metadata (track listings, credits, etc.), whereas EchoNest specializes in using algorithms to extract novel features.
- cheshire137 13y agoGreat, this'll probably adversely affect Rdio and I'll have to leave them to go back to Spotify with its shitty mobile apps.