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The Echo Nest

www.echonest.com

Methodology

The Echo Nest is an exciting new service currently in development by two computer scientists at MIT, which aims to understand the technical and cultural nature of music in order to make music recommendations. To conduct cultural analysis of music, the Echo Nest's "Music Brain" will search blogs, reviews, and other content on the internet and develop a meta-understanding of the music's cultural context. As for technical analysis, the service will conduct audio analysis, including forms of digital signal processing, to understand the inherent nature of the audio. It will use these two sources of information to organize music collections, create seamless playlists, and generate recommendations for listeners.

Pros and Cons

The Echo Nest is a service on the horizon with a conceptual approach to personalized music recommendation that shows great potential. By creating a dual understanding of the technical and cultural underpinnings of music, The Echo Nest has the potential to accurately and precisely integrate the art and science of music recommendation. It will be interesting to see how this service chooses to deal with the specific issues discussed on this website, in order to create a simple, entertaining, and powerful music recommendation service.