API Is The New mp3
With the music industry in shambles it was only a matter of time before a conference focusing solely on the newest innovations and most cutting edge technology developing around the industry would take place. This past week was the first Rethink Music Conference put on by Berklee College of Music and The Berkman Center at Harvard Law in Boston, Massachusetts at the Hynes Convention Center.
At the center of this conference was music intelligence company, Echo Nest. Their platform known as the Musical Brain does three very important things. It starts by reading about music, constantly analyzing millions of blog posts and reviews. It also has the ability to listen to audio files, extracting musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy and harmonic and timbral structures, to understand every song in similar ways a musician would describe it. Lastly, it also has the ability to analyze the entire world of online music behavior — who’s talking about which artists this week, what songs are being streamed and downloaded, etc. — to understand the latest trends, buzz and fan opinion.
Echo Nest powers some of the biggest music based companies; MTV, Mog, The BBC, Warner Music Group and most recently Rdio. Although they do not power exfm as a whole we did look to them for the creation of our blog finder. It’s even what Marshall one of our Founders and also our Creative Director used to build his music hack day app Highlight to Listen which then went on to become a featured contender for the Best Music Hack Award at the MTV O Awards. I’m sure you can now begin to imagine they type of apps and companies that can be built on top of this platform. Echo Nest may just be single-handedly shaping the future of the music industry.
The Boston Phoenix recently used this this quote from Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese when writing about the Rethink Music Conference and it is one I would also like to leave you with. “We understand the entire language of music better than anyone else to date, and now we’ve put that research and analysis in to the hands of application developers… To us there is no doubt about it — this is the new class of creative people who are reshaping the role of music in our lives. With them, we’re aiming toward where things are heading, and making sure that we’re still around when it explodes.”
Make sure to check out the Echo Nest blog where you can keep up with the latest music-tech developments and even recommend apps you’d like to see developed through their platform.
