The Echo Nest and eMusic Announce Partnership

SOMERVILLE, Mass. and NEW YORK, Aug. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter music apps across the web and devices, announced a new type of partnership with eMusic, a digital music service for independent-minded music collectors, which combines The Echo Nest's rich music data platform and eMusic's highly-regarded editorial to spin out a series of music discovery applications.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20101214/NE17511LOGO )

The first product bringing together this unique teaming of man and machine is eMusic Radio, launching in beta with dozens of curated radio programs based on emerging artists, local music scenes, and more. Programs are curated by eMusic's top-notch editorial staff and music writers, as well as industry influencers.

eMusic program curators can now use The Echo Nest's Playlist and Taste Profiling engine to create and enhance eMusic Radio programs efficiently, based on artist connections, song similarity, mood, style and detailed acoustic attributes: tempo, energy, danceability, time signature, and key.

By leveraging The Echo Nest's store of music information – the biggest in the world with over five billion musical data points – eMusic members can access an unprecedented level of musical depth and context.

This is the first in a series of new listening features that combine eMusic's editorial and The Echo Nest's powerful music intelligence platform to help eMusic members discover more new music. New applications will complement other discovery features, such as the authentic album and artist reviews currently available on eMusic.com.

"eMusic has always been about more than just access to music – it's long been a trusted source of musical insight and discovery," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "This partnership gives us the freedom to work with eMusic on a series of applications aimed at giving the most serious fans new ways to broaden and deepen their musical understanding."

"By combining The Echo Nest's best-in-class music intelligence platform and our distinguished editorial, we're able to offer a more sophisticated music discovery experience for our members that centers on listening," said Richard Caccappolo, CTO of eMusic "The Echo Nest has helped expand upon our team's music knowledge base by providing track suggestions within a musical theme. Essentially, we've created the audio cure for writer's block.".

Examples of eMusic Radio beta programs employing recommendations from The Echo Nest:

• Gimme Indie Rock! (http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/radio/gimme-indie-rock/)

• Guitar Rawk (http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/radio/guitar-rawk/)

• Slo-Mo Hotel: Slowcore Classics (http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/radio/slo-mo-hotel-slow-core-classics/)

• Rock of the '90s (http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/radio/never-mind/)

Music fans in the U.S. can try eMusic Radio in beta for free at: http://www.emusic.com/radio/.

About The Echo Nest

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company that connects the greatest application developers to the best data and music to enable the next generation of music experiences. Powered by the world's only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up a massive repository of over 5 billion dynamic music data points to application developers ranging from one-person operations to multinational corporations. Over 200 music applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform to date and its customers reach over 100,000,000 music fans every month. The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs. Winner of four National Science Foundation SBIR grants, The Echo Nest's investors include Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab. For more information, visit www.echonest.com.

About eMusic

eMusic is a digital music service for independent-minded music collectors. eMusic Members sign up for a monthly subscription that allows them to discover, download and own music. eMusic also sells downloadable audio books from all major audio book publishers. Headquartered in New York with an office in London, eMusic is available in the U.S., Canada, the E.U., Norway and Switzerland. eMusic.com Inc. is owned by Dimensional Associates, Inc., the private equity arm of JDS Capital Management, Inc. For more information, visit http://www.eMusic.com. NOTE: eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of eMusic.com Inc. in the U.S. or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE The Echo Nest