The Echo Nest Blog

Recommend API and The Echotron

Mon, 12 May 2008 11:54:00 -0400

We’ve just launched our Recommend API. It’s the second in a series of many more web services for music interactivity and discovery to come out of the Nest. The Recommend API lets you make excellent predictions of taste on your own web site or application— either globally or filtered through the universe of artists you care about. In the future we’ll be spending more time talking about what makes our approach different and why our results are better at covering the entire world of music. For now, just get started, grab a key, and try it out for yourself.

Along with the Recommend release comes the beta release (invite only, but please sign up for a login) of The Echotron, a personalized music site. The Echotron has a long history at The Echo Nest; it began life in 2006 as a developer front end to our internal data stores but in early 2008 our very capable Team Web (dev Dale, ukulele wizard Adam, designer Todd) turned it into a very useful standalone web app. The Echotron lets you read about, watch and listen to music — you register things you like, and we’ll always show you the latest stuff out there — blog posts, new tracks posted, videos and other stuff you’ll definitely be into. The Echotron will grow over time to include more views on all of our data, so get in when you can and take a listen.

Congratulations Matmos!

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:52:00 -0400

Matmos’s “Supreme Balloon” drops today. It’s an excellent record, you can buy it or hear a jam with some of the tracks. The Echo Nest was very proud to have contributed to the record by analyzing a bunch of the tracks and then making some waterfall plots on the timbre coefficients. Robert Syrett took our plot and drew an almost pixel-for-fiber rendition in watercolor. The watercolor as not-so-vague terrain under the Syrett balloon comprises the album cover.

Drew & Martin have been friends of the Nest since before there was a Nest — co-founder Brian first met them when he was a starving research scientist/electronic musician in NYC in 2000 (they’ve even been colocated) and they currently sit at the top of our nascent yet useful Musical Advisory Board. As a way-too-nice gift they gave us the original Syrett rendition that’s on the record, we immediately framed it up (after the co-founders Brian and Tristan fought about the mat color like an old married couple) and we gaze upon what might just be the first in a long series of Things Our Company Does That a Lot of People See.

The Echo Nest wins NSF SBIR Phase II Grant

Thu, 01 May 2008 20:45:00 -0400

We’re thrilled to announce that The Echo Nest has received an NSF SBIR Phase II grant. (We won the Phase I in 2007.) The Nest was recently at the grantees conference in Baltimore where we met some fellow grantees and caught up with some old friends. We’d show you pictures, but they’d mostly be of Tristan in bed (he got sick) and Brian trying to find McNulty.

The grant supports The Echo Nest’s continued development of our “Musical Brain,” a large-scale data mining platform that actually reads about music and listens to music everywhere on the internet.