Pandora and Last.fm may seem to have the online music discovery market cornered, but another variation on the theme emerged today with The Echo Nest opening up its platform to developers.
The Echo Nest’s selling point is what it describes as its Musical Brain – technology that can automatically listen to and classify music, read what is being written about it and learn from user reactions to music.
It uses this knowledge to create a number of services, such as enhanced music search, recommendations and interactivity.
The Echo Nest presented at the Demo conference today, showing how it is powering personal radio stations on the imeem social network and allowing users to mix in cowbells and Christopher Walken phrases to songs they upload to MoreCowbell.dj.
Rather than take on Pandora and Last.fm directly, it hopes to encourage developers and media companies to spread its technology across their sites and eventually earn licensing fees.
“We don’t want to be the next Pandora or Last.fm, we want to power the next 1,000 Pandoras and Last.fms,” Jim Lucchese, chief executive, told me.
The Echo Nest, based in Massachusetts, was founded by two former MIT Media Lab members, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan and its investors include a co-founder of the lab. It also announced first-round VC funding on Monday from Commonwealth Capital Ventures.
