
The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio - raphar
http://www.fastcompany.com/1734773/echo-nest-makes-pandora-look-like-a-transistor-radio
======
guywithabike
I don't know if it's just me, but Pandora is a pretty low bar for music
recommendations. I paid for Pandora One for a few years, but pretty much
stopped using it after a few months because its playlists would be incredibly
incongruous. My Radiohead station became overrun with, for example, Katy Perry
despite my efforts to "thumbs down" songs that didn't fit the Radiohead sound
that I wanted.

Invariably, every time I've tried Pandora since, it plays one or two songs
that match (the same ones every time, which gets really boring) before it
meanders off into a forest constructed of oddities and WTF moments.

iTunes' Genius recommendations / playlists, though, have been incredibly good
for me. Relatively obscure / nuanced selections generate amazingly well-
balanced playlists with good variety without straying too far from the sound I
want to listen to. For example, RJD2's "Final Frontier" is followed by:

* DJ Shadow - Keep Em Close * Blackalicious - Rhymes For The Deaf, Dumb, And Blind * Wax Tailor - I Don't Know

Pandora, on the other hand, comes up with:

* Diddy - We Gon' Make It * T.I - Doperman * Diverse - Wylin Out

I know Pandora's selecting from a huge library and iTunes Genius is selecting
from my library, but my library is incredibly diverse and is in no way narrow
enough to improve Genius' results. I get great playlists for everything from
Coconut Records to Mayer Hawthorne to The Black Keys to Johnny Cash to the
Heartless Bastards.

Maybe Pandora was good for it's time, but it simply hasn't improved enough
over time. It's as if Netflix still used their original recommendation
algorithm.

tl;dr: Saying Echo Nest is better than Pandora is not a very strong statement.

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JCB_K
I don't really get it. So it's a very big database of music metadata, where
apps can pull information from, but it doesn't include the actual music. So if
Pandora is a transistor radio, then The Echo Nest is a big encyclopedia. And
in my world transistor radios play more music than encyclopedias.

~~~
brianwhitman
Yes, that is a better analogy, but the technical bar for streaming audio is
very low -- far lower than understanding the music. You'll be seeing a lot
more consumer oriented uses of our data in the near future that stream music.

Developers interested in making a 'pandora of the future' should read about
our deals with 7digital, IDJ and play.me/dada that handle the content side of
things:

[http://notes.variogr.am/post/1373556723/the-future-music-
pla...](http://notes.variogr.am/post/1373556723/the-future-music-platform-
music-startups-imminent)

[http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/09/when-data-and-music-
me...](http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/09/when-data-and-music-meet/)

<http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/idj-echo-nest/>

For example, 7D has many millions of songs available for on demand streaming
-- and you can get their IDs from us in API calls. Here's a pandora style
playlist for KFW with 7D IDs, sorted by increasing tempo and only popular
artists that sound like KFW; when we say things like "we have more data, we
can do more" this is what we mean

[http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/playlist/static?api_key...](http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/playlist/static?api_key=N6E4NIOVYMTHNDM8J&artist=Keith%20Fullerton%20Whitman&type=artist-
radio&artist_min_familiarity=.5&sort=tempo-
asc&results=20&bucket=id:7digital&bucket=tracks)

------
chime
Here's the million song dataset: <http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/>

Last night I downloaded the SQLite db 'track_metadata.db' and ran some simple
queries like sorting for the hottest artists (Kanye West, Daft Punk, Black
Eyed Peas), most prolific artists (Ike and Tina Turner: 208, Michael Jackson:
204, Johnny Cash: 201), higher average song-length by year (1975: 258s, 1976:
255s, 2001: 254s).

I wish the SQLite db contained more fields like beats, loudness, song_hotness
etc. as rickrolled here:
[http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/pages/example-
tra...](http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/pages/example-track-
description). I don't think everyone needs the full waveform-analysis data
present in the 280GB download.

I'd rather download a 2GB metadata file for multi-variable analysis like the
Netflix prize instead of the entire 280GB dataset just to get the additional
fields.

My end-goal was to do some analysis of what makes an artist/song 'hot'. If
anyone is interested, I could redo something like
<http://chir.ag/projects/preztags/> but with music data.

~~~
brianwhitman
hi chime,

if you want, you are free to use our API -- <http://developer.echonest.com/>
and query for that stuff manually to get the fields if you don't want to
process the whole dump. (If you are getting rate limited let me or Paul know
and we can raise your limit temporarily)

If you'd like a different organization of it, please write Thierry or me or
Paul and we'll take it into consideration. We'd like as many people as
possible to use this.

------
3dFlatLander
Their music recommendation database has more songs and attributes. But theres
no service that streams all the music they have indexed like Pandora does.

------
physcab
Meh. I've seen recommendations from The Echo Nest and they are absolute shit.
I don't know what their algorithms are but they sure do need to change them. I
am a huge fan of LabRosa though, so maybe their partnership will help them
out.

If you want to see recommendations from a company that truly kick ass, check
out BMat. Their technology works insanely well.

------
jamii
I applied for an internship at Echo Nest and never got a reply. It's not a big
deal but it does make life easier for job hunters if companies respond with a
definite 'no'. Even a form letter would be fine.

~~~
brianwhitman
I searched for your HN mail in our jobs thing and did not find a hit, but
nonetheless I'm very sorry if this was our mistake. We love to hire interns,
and interns love us. Please write me -- brian@echonest.com -- if you're still
interested.

