E
Echo Nest Blog
blog.echonest.com · Company blog · on HN since 2008
The Echo Nest's company blog on music data, fingerprinting, genre analysis, and its API, ending with its acquisition by Spotify.
What HN saysHN links it for the Spotify acquisition and genre classification; commenters recall Music Hackday and note the API would stay up.
32HN people shared it
20linked it in comments
16stories submitted
151story points
3 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Homepage7 people · first shared 2010
- 2The Echo Nest Joins Spotify3 people · 22 points · first shared 2014 · 8 comments on HN
- 3Echoprint, a free and open source music fingerprint and identification service3 people · 4 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 4The Echo Nest (music data startup) is hiring3 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 5How We Cope with Spammers, Fakers, and Cloners2 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 6Spotify acquires echo nest2 people · first shared 2014
- 7The Echo Nest partners with EMI1 people · 58 points · first shared 2011 · 15 comments on HN
- 8The Future of Music Genres Is Here1 people · 44 points · first shared 2014 · 44 comments on HN
- 97 Decades, 7 Musical Evolutions1 people · 9 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Unmissing Persons: A Detective Story1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 11The Echo Nest: How We Resolve Artists on the Internet1 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 12Knowledge Engineer / Developer1 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 13Plotting Music’s Emotional Valence (2013)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 14Top 3 Social Music Apps From EchoNest's Social Music Competition1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 15Echo Nest: The Musical Brain-- How It Works1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
MrPoush · 2024-01-02
It looks like Autocanonizer depends on (the now defunct) Echo Nest (http://the.echonest.com). Spotify bought it back in '16, and the site stopped serving content sometime mid-May of 2020.
cheesedoodle · 2023-09-16
Music Hackday was great (Infinite Gagnam Style anyone? [0]) and I especially remember Reykjavik 2012 as a personal transformative event! I made Horisfy [1] and and won best hack, very similar to Johnny Cash, but riding horses on Iceland.
This was the time before Echonest was bought by Spotify and Tomahawk (used in Johnny Cash hack) was sprawling.
Fun memories :=)
[0] https://blog.echonest.com/post/34826507401/infinite-gangnam-style
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121031194040/https://wiki.musichackday.o…
bogomipz · 2017-03-09
How does this differ from the echo nest that they acquired?
http://the.echonest.com/
maxerickson · 2016-12-02
See also http://everynoise.com/ which is a view into how Spotify classifies music.
The creator wrote about it here:
http://blog.echonest.com/post/52385283599/how-we-understand-music-genr…
and writes a lot about it on their blog:
http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?terms=noise&type=search
Of course those are going in the other direction, not generating the classification from the data, but it's probably one of the best data sets as far as classifying existing music.
hakanito · 2016-09-24
Spotify acquired a startup called EchoNest[1] a while back. Discover Weekly is probably based off their technology.
[1] http://the.echonest.com/
touristtam · 2015-03-13
that reminds me of this project: MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections (http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/)
there is a commercial product for unique ID provided by http://the.echonest.com/
kabir_h · 2011-11-01
The Echo Nest - Somerville, MA
The Echo Nest powers amazing music apps with our API, including apps from the BBC, MTV, iHeartRadio and other music services you use and love.
We've got a killer engineering culture, well-stocked beer fridge and you can help shape the future of music. Come meet the whole company and see what it's like this weekend at Boston Music Hack Day: http://boston.musichackday.org/2011/
The after party is at our offices and Questlove is playing. How many of your company parties has Questlove played?
Jobs:
Engineer
Junior Engineering Intern
Music Information Retrieval Scientist
Senior Engineer
http://the.echonest.com/company/jobs/
MLnick · 2010-06-06
Agree with your points 1 and 2, for point 1 some sources are available e.g. http://the.echonest.com/
unimpressive · 2013-09-13
1. I can name exactly one time that an ad was actually something I might be interested in.
2. Conflict of interest. An advertiser's job is to get me to buy/view/etc something, often with misleading statements. Whether me doing that is actually in my best interest isn't factored into the equation.
3. Annoying. 'Shady' ad practices do and will continue to exist. In any case they take up screen real estate.
4. Advertisers are compiling huge databases that they intend to fill with all sorts of intimate information about me. What I like to read (what I read), who I talk with, what I talk about, etc. These databases are ripe for all sorts of abuse, both outside and within the domain they're being compiled for. (Great example: http://blog.echonest.com/post/27047918145/musical-taste-politics)
5. Another conflict of interest is between me and the service itself. When the service is mainly powered by ad revenue it means that anything that's good for ads is in the interests of the service, even if it's bad for me. (Eg. Taking up more and more screen real estate, sandwiching ads in between the 'legitimate' content.)
For a start.
__ingrid__ · 2012-07-08
The Echo Nest (http://the.echonest.com/)
sanj · 2008-08-03
The one I have found is http://the.echonest.com/recommend/
diydsp · 2020-01-28
Why do you think they acquired Echo Nest for 50 million euros? It's the music discovery engine, not the streaming.[0]
[0] http://the.echonest.com/pressreleases/spotify-acquires-echo-nest/
mintplant · 2015-10-08
allbutlost · 2014-03-06
"The Echo Nest API will remain free and open to support its robust developer ecosystem."
http://the.echonest.com/pressreleases/spotify-acquires-echo-nest/
whirlycott1 · 2014-03-06
It's a venture funded business. There are only three outcomes: sell, go public or crash. What were you expecting?
They also said their API will stay up:
http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-joins-spotify
r721 · 2014-03-06
The Echo Nest blog announcement:
http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-joins-spotify
brianwhitman · 2012-10-21
hah -- any one of you would do the same faced with an overzealous auto-linker js on IRCCloud, a discussion there about the README.md it points to and access to a corporate credit card. it was very funny at the time, i promise. here's our "announcement": http://blog.echonest.com/post/9332881544/new-pyechonest-on-github-at-h…
jamesgagan · 2011-11-03
I imagine this is at least part of the reason why echonest got rid of the "found audio" feeds in their API - http://blog.echonest.com/post/9371410835/deprecating-artist-audio-meth…
For now I will stick with Soundcloud - the future going forward is to support artists who put their music out there without holding a gun to anyone's head.
vintermann · 2022-08-23
Oh, they have been aware of it for a long time.
https://blog.echonest.com/post/48943428838/how-we-cope-with-spammers-f…
Spotify is actually half-decent here. The other streaming services seem to mainly compete on cutting costs, and many are little more than frontends over 7digital's services (who, surprise, also do virtually nothing to prevent spam).
To take an example:
https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/album
That particular spammer has been doing this thing for years. He's easily recognizable: one characteristic is the way he uses colour filters. If you search qobuz (one of these terrible front-end streaming services which does no QQ) for the label "piano to go", and say, the album "Joker Games", you'll notice it's uploaded once for Bill Haley, and once for Bill Haley & his Comets. That was apparently close enough to be detected as a duplicate, so he put a blue image filter on the latter.
Most of this guy's albums eventually get deleted (or delisted), even on sites like Qobuz - probably more for lack of plays than for being detected as spam, I'd bet. So you don't get his full history. But I found out the French library service made some effort to catalogue streaming releases a while back, and with access to search in those, you can track his evolution. He was a lot sloppier in the past, for instance he didn't bother to come up with a new label name for every dump. But he's been at it since at least 2015.
grinich · 2014-03-06
Really happy for these guys. :) I consulted with Norwest for technical due diligence during the last fundraising round[1], and was super impressed with what this team has built. Audio classification at scale is a really difficult thing to get right.
They're also one of the few companies who have successfully navigated the minefield of the music business, which takes a painstaking amount of focus and determination. But above all, they created a remarkable service to powering the next-generation of music experiences. Spotify seems like an obvious fit (especially given the Spotify Platform[2]), and I'm really excited to see where they go next.
As an aside, The Echo Nest has been a huge supporter of the start/tech scene in Boston. For 5 years now they organized "Music Hack Day"[3] which brought together musicians and engineers to build fun projects. Here's hoping they keep it up!
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/12/echo-nest-raises-17-…
[2] https://developer.spotify.com/
[3] http://blog.echonest.com/post/66776489063/the-echo-nests-5th-music-hac…