The Echo Nest Blog

The islands of Jamaica and the United Kingdom produce a disproportionate number of musical styles and artists, according to musical legend. The world of pop music would be missing huge pieces, th...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/80579764363

Longtime SXSW attendees feel like they’ve seen it all, as the music, film, and technology festival seems to get bigger and busier each and every year. But one thing they’d never seen is an ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/79589884404

We’re very excited to announce that The Echo Nest is joining Spotify, starting today! We can’t imagine a better partner for our next chapter. Spotify shares the intense care for the music...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941

“We built this city on rock ‘n roll,” observed the '80s band Starship. Which city? Contenders include San Francisco , or possibly New York or Cleveland, depending on the verse. So, wh...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/78678455663

The great thing about APIs like ours is that they let developers integrate mountains of functionality and data without having to build it all themselves. By combining multiple APIs, they can mak...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/78556786144

Hot on the heels of his widely-viewed maps of the most distinctive and favorite recording artists in each of the 50 states, The Echo Nest director of developer platform Paul Lamere published ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/78132642441

A music map created by our amazing director of developer platform Paul Lamere went viral yesterday. You can find his map in today’s print issue of USA Today, or on seemingly any publication ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/78029462724

The Echo Nest director of developer platform Paul Lamere has determined the recording artist that is most “distinctive” to music fans in any state – that is to say, their favorite artists, ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/77823521396

One person’s favorite music is another person’s horrible racket – it’s just the way of the world. When those two people are separated by a generation or two, musical taste can diverge pre...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/76648748318

We’re pleased to announce that NTT Plala’s “Hikari-TV” will now include radio stations and playlists powered by The Echo Nest, as we continue our ongoing global expansion with our second ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/76323483353

“Men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” as a book famously claimed. Both of these genders agree, however, that the music of Bruno Mars is well worth a listen – it’s just about...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/76261153411

We really love our Music Hack Days here at The Echo Nest, for a plethora of reasons, chief among them that it’s fun to watch talented visionaries focus their energies on building the future ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/75911355901

With tens of millions of songs to choose from, music fans need as much help as they can get to find songs that strike a chord – the perfect song for that person, at that time. As you can read...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/75702007749

The world contains many databases about many things, to put it mildly. They’re great at talking to themselves, because, on a basic level, the rows and columns know what’s in the other rows an...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/74192147161

The folks at MIT Media Lab, NYU, and Peer 2 Peer University recently set out to teach the world how to manipulate music with a computer and a browser through interactive classes on PlayWithYourM...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/74089669769

Since we helped launch the popular Music Hack Day series as a founding organizer in 2009, we’ve been lucky enough to watch some of the smartest people in the world build every music app the...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/73615845268

We’ve always felt ambivalent about the word “genre” at The Echo Nest. On one hand, it’s the most universal shorthand for classifying music, because everyone has a basic understanding of t...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/73516217273

If you have yet to encounter the “zero UI” or “no UI” phenomenon, it’s basically about designing software outside of the traditional model of “a screen plus some controls.” In suc...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/73320869794

In 2013, The Echo Nest’s music intelligence leadership hit the next level. We doubled down on our world-leading Music Discovery & Personalization and Dynamic Music Data solutions. We introduc...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/72790124434

Did you notice the calendar switch from 2013 to 2014? This seems to happen every year, bringing a deluge of end-of-year lists, especially where music is concerned. Still, we promise you have yet ...

https://blog.echonest.com/post/72464366661