Today music intelligence providers The Echo Nest announced a partnership with Spotify that provides an integrated API for Spotify app developers. The team-up wil provide developers with easy access to The Echo Nest’s vast store of music information, which can be used to do things like retrieve song lyrics or display related Tweets as a song is played.
The Echo Nest, founded in 2005, has been working on a common language for music services called “Rosetta Stone” that will allow for better communication of data related to tracks, albums and artists across various platforms. Spotify API integration means that developers using Spotify’s API, which it opened to third-party developers in November, will now also be able to leverage The Echo Nest’s musical big data services for their creations. It’s something The Echo Nest co-founder and CTO Brian Whitman says opens the floodgates of possibility in terms of what devs can do with Spotify’s API, just as it dramatically changed Spotify itself.
“There are many millions of tracks available on Spotify and, until our recent integration on their radio product back in December, no good way to find it all,” Whitman said. “But there is so much more to discovery than radio and we look to our community of over 10 thousand developers to invent the future of music consumption and discovery.”
Music delivery, now that it can tie back to data sources like the ones provided by The Echo Nest, is no longer about providing a strictly aural product to a listener. It’s becoming more about providing users with an experience, one with many dimensions; services rise and fall based on what they add to the experience, like Turntable.fm’s social DJ approach for example. The Echo Nest provides developers with yet another tool for coming up with something unique, especially now that it’s delivered alongside the music itself through Spotify’s API integration.
Whitman also thinks that what The Echo Nest provides can help the music industry as a whole, including artists. “The Echo Nest knows about every artist in the world, from the most popular ones to ones that are just getting going,” he said. “We can help new artists get discovered by knowing everything there is to know about them – we’ve shown that listeners that use our stuff tend to listen to more diverse music due to the quality of our data.”
All existing Spotify developers need to do to access the service starting today is register for a free Echo Nest API key, and they’ll get access to all of the company’s services. Whitman wouldn’t comment on The Echo Nest’s revenue plans or arrangements, but he did say that the platform now supports over 300 music apps, and that it provides data on over 2 million artists.
Both Spotify and The Echo Nest want to be the backend for a revolution in the way people listen to music, and teaming up to deliver their complimentary services in a single package should help both achieve that goal.
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