The Echo Nest Releases New Research Findings

SOMERVILLE, Mass., June 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, the industry's leading music intelligence company, has issued results from new research into Musical Identity, understanding who you are as a music fan and what your taste in music says about you.

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People skip, rate, share, replay, create stations from, and otherwise interact with online music in ways they never did with any previous format. This activity generates anonymised usage data, the understanding of which can allow targeting of programming and advertising on a finer basis than was possible with the broad radio formats of yesteryear. The Echo Nest can analyze this detailed data using its unique system for understanding not only music, but also what people are saying about music, and construct detailed Taste Profiles of music fans, at scale.

The Echo Nest continues to explore how Musical Identity relates to other facets of life, which will enable new forms of cross-media recommendation and advertising; help music and other services engage users upon their first visit to a site or use of an app; and allow new possibilities including playlists based on just a few movie or book preferences, or on location, among other things.

Following up on previous research that connected musical taste to political affiliation, The Echo Nest co-founder and CTO Brian Whitman revealed this week how music preference can predict movie preference. This has fascinating and practical applications, such as targeting movie marketing based on a user's musical taste.

The Echo Nest's Taste Profiles, unlike any other recommendation system, understand not just that two people listened to the same song, but how their overall Musical Identities relate to each other -- and how those relate to other things like movies or politics. By analyzing the music behavior and movie preferences of 50,000 random, anonymous people, The Echo Nest concluded, among many other things:

• If you like listening to Jay-Z, your favorite movies are most probably Toy Story, Step Brothers, or Buddy The Elf.
  
  
• If you like the movies Pure Country, 8 Seconds, or Country Strong, you most probably enjoy the music of Tim McGraw.
  
  
• If you like crime movies, you most probably enjoy listening to Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, The Who, Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd in that order.
  
  
• Science Fiction and Fantasy movies might seem similar to each other, but their fans differ quite a bit from a music taste perspective.

"We see Musical Identity, an understanding of each music fan as an overall person, as the next key driver of digital music growth," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "Listening is unlike any other way in which people express who they are, and we have spent years of research and development forming the deepest understanding of Musical Identity based on that behavior, and on music itself."

The Echo Nest will continue to share more Musical Identity findings with the industry, media, and public. The latest research into the relationship between music and movie taste is available at variogr.am, with a summary at musicalidentity.echonest.com.

About The Echo Nest:
The Echo Nest is the industry's leading music intelligence company, providing developers with the deepest understanding of music content and music listeners.

Leading music services (Clear Channel's iHeartradio, MOG, Rdio, SiriusXM, Spotify), editorial, video and social media networks (BBC.com, Foursquare, MTV, Twitter, VEVO, Yahoo!), connected device manufacturers (Buongiorno, doubleTwist, Nokia) and big brands (Coca Cola, Intel, Microsoft, Reebok) access the largest repository of music data and intelligence through our open API to build smarter music experiences that help fans to better discover, share and interact with the music they love. The Echo Nest's customer base reaches over 100 million music fans every month and over 400 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform.

Headquartered in Somerville, MA, The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs. Investors include Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab..

SOURCE The Echo Nest

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