The Echo Nest - powering intelligent digital music applications

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company that powers smarter music applications for a wide range of customers -- including MTV, The BBC, MOG, Thumbplay, Warner Music Group and a community of about 7,000 independent app developers.

The Echo Nest’s customers reach over 100,000,000 music fans every month. These application developers have built over 340 music applications on The Echo Nest platform, including music search, discovery, playlisting, location-based mobile applications, music games and analytics-driven marketing applications. Check out some of these applications here.

Powered by the world’s only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up a massive repository of dynamic music data to application developers to re-shape how we all experience music. The Echo Nest was co-founded in 2005 by two MIT Media Lab PhDs, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan. Winner of three National Science Foundation SBIR grants, The Echo Nest’s investors include Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.

Our Platform - The Musical Brain

Our applications are powered by a musical brain built at the Echo Nest along with years of research at UC Berkeley, Columbia and MIT. The musical brain automatically:

1. Reads about music, constantly analyzing millions of blog posts, reviews, playlists and discussion forums to understand how the online world describes every artist, album and song.
2. Listens to music, with technology actually listens to audio files, extracting musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy, harmonic and timbral structures, to understand every song in similar ways a musician would describe it (e.g. "heavy beat, swing groove, fast tempo, 4/4 time, key of B flat, mezzo piano").
3. Learns about music trends, analyzing the entire world of online music behavior — who's talking about which artists this week, what songs are being streamed and downloaded, etc. — to understand the latest trends, buzz and fan opinion.