The Echo Nest Serves Up the Free Music Archive for Developers

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Oct. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter music apps across the web and devices, has applied its revolutionary technology to the Free Music Archive, a tastemaker-curated selection of nearly 40,000 songs available under Creative Commons and other licenses.

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App developers can now tap into The Echo Nest's API to add all of this high-quality music to radio stations, playlists, remixers, videogames, compilations, and other music apps. As they integrate this free, valuable music, developers can leverage all the benefits of The Echo Nest's audio analysis engine: detailed information about each song's tempo, loudness, energy level, "danceability," and other traits, as well as data summarizing every audio event in every song (where the beats fall, where the transitions are, key, timbre, and harmonic content).

Developers with great ideas are sometimes frustrated by the difficulty of licensing music. Now, they can build nearly any music app they can conceive without worrying about legal ramifications or sacrificing musical quality. Every song in the Free Music Archive was curated by respected tastemakers including WFMU, KEXP, All Tomorrow's Parties, Primavera Sound, dublab, Blip Festival, and more.  

The Echo Nest applies its unique Rosetta Stone technology, which functions as a universal translator between music catalogs, to every artist and song in the Free Music Archive. As a result, developers building apps that access unlimited music catalogs such as Rdio, Spotify, or any other collection can seamlessly include the Creative Commons-licensed version of each song without requiring a subscription or limiting playback to a short sample. "The Echo Nest's advanced music tools give listeners intelligent ways to discover new tracks and artists in the FMA's curated open music library.  We're excited to hear how the developer community utilizes these resources to create smarter applications with high-quality music that wants to be shared," says Jason Sigal, Managing Director of the Free Music Archive.

Developers can retrieve all of this information about the music in the Free Music Archive by simply accessing The Echo Nest's API.

About The Echo Nest:

The Echo Nest powers smarter music applications for leading media companies and thousands of independent developers, with a customer base that reaches over 100 million music fans every month across over 200 applications. With the world's only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up the largest repository of dynamic music data in the world – over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs -- to help developers re-shape the experience of playing -- and playing with -- music. The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs.  Investors include Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.

About FMA

The Free Music Archive (FMA | freemusicarchive.org) is the world's first curated platform for music that wants to be shared. Nonprofit radio station WFMU spearheads the project in collaboration with a worldwide network of established music curators. The FMA's rapidly expanding library currently hosts 40,000 mp3s in all styles and genres, primarily under Creative Commons licenses which allow for various degrees of creative re-use.

SOURCE The Echo Nest