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