Of the many ways the traditional music industry has struggled in the fast evolving digital music world has been understanding who is listening, why they’re listening , when and where they’re listening and find ways to build music-based products and services around that — especially since not as many people are buying music as they used to.
This is where The Echo Nest comes in. A start-up based in Somerville, Massachusetts is a self-described music intelligence company that powers music applications and services for developers and media companies based on data that it is automatically collates from millions of songs and music articles around the Web.
Chief Executive Jim Lucchese, a former music lawyer, compares one element of Echo Nest’s offering to the ever popular Pandora whose Music Genome Project indexed over 800,000 songs in a major labor of love which involved hundreds of musicians/analysts. He says Echo Nest’s technology is able to index millions of songs on any number of criteria in seconds.
Lucchese is convinced the music industry faces a huge problem of being able to understand more than 10 million songs online plus 3, 000 new songs and 15,000 music reviews added online everyday as well as the 700,000 unique users who access music online every minute.
“Music access is almost a commodity, the value has become about the experience whether through a game or a mobile application consumers have a much higher expectation and this requires a lot of data to enable it,” he said.
