Spotify today announced that it has acquired The Echo Nest, a Boston-based music intelligence company, for an undisclosed sum.
The Echo Nest’s technologies act as the foundation upon which many other music services have been built. Its APIs have been used to collect fan-written artist biographies for Yahoo; to create location-aware music databases for Nuance; and to power music recommendation tools for Rdio, iHeartRadio, and Spotify.
Those tools will remain available after the acquisition. “The Echo Nest API will remain free and open to support its robust developer ecosystem,” the company says. “The developer community is crucial to the success of both Spotify and The Echo Nest and will remain a priority for the combined companies.”
This acquisition will make Spotify even more important to the streaming music ecosystem. The company already uses its music catalog to convince developers to build apps for its platform — now it owns the services that have allowed many other companies to bolster their own music services.
Put another way: Spotify isn’t just appealing to music listeners by offering a streaming music service. It’s also trying to establish itself as the company to which every other company turns to realize its own musical ambitions. Promoting its developer platform was the first step toward realizing this goal; acquiring The Echo Nest is the next. [Pando.Com)
Source:
- Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest
- The Echo Nest Joins Spotify!
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