Music Recommendation API to help music websites offer uses a more personalized experience.
SOMERVILLE, Mass., May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company providing enhanced music search, recommendation and interactivity technology to online music companies, launched its second hosted application, "Recommend," today.
Recommend is an application programming interface or "API" that helps music services personalize their websites to each visitor's unique music taste. Any music website -- bloggers, social networks, Internet radio or retailers -- can easily access the Recommend API to offer users better music discovery tools.
The most common approach to music recommendation is collaborative filtering ("users who did this also did that...") which is based on a user's click stream or purchase behavior, without any underlying musical understanding. This approach can result incomplete coverage and inaccurate results, especially for non-mainstream music.
Recommend takes a far more comprehensive approach. Recommend is powered by The Echo Nest's patented Musical Brain, an automated machine learning platform with an in-depth understanding of the cultural and acoustic factors that inform music preference. The Musical Brain combines:
1. Cultural understanding - data mining and language processing to analyze fan opinion, online buzz, editorial and reviews from everywhere on the web.
2. Musical understanding - machine listening technology that automatically extracts the pitch, key, tempo and other musical attributes from every song on the web to understand a song the same way a musician would describe it.
This combination of cultural and musical understanding powers music recommendations with a few major advantages over collaborative filtering and other current approaches:
Long-Tail Friendly. Recommend understands indie and long-tail music as well as the Billboard 100, eliminating the well-known 'popularity effect' and 'cold start' problems with collaborative filtering systems.
Complete Coverage. A scalable platform that grows along with the world of online music every day.
Aware of the Music Trends. Understanding the latest buzz and online trends in real time, ensuring recommendations informed by what's happening now
The Echo Nest is offering a free version and "Recommend Unlimited" a fee-based, more feature-rich version of the API. To celebrate the release of Recommend, The Echo Nest is offering free "Unlimited" accounts to the first 100 small music websites who register for API access at http://the.echonest.com/.
About The Echo Nest
Founded by two MIT PhDs. the Echo Nest develops technology to make connections between people and their music more meaningful. The Echo Nest is a three-time National Science Foundation SBIR grant winner. Their most recent recognition came last week for the development of the Musical Brain with a $500,000 National Science Foundation Phase II SBIR grant. Investors include a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and a Boston-based private investment fund.
The Echo Nest
