![]() Mainstreamness – How widely popular is what you listen to?.By assessing the meta data of what you listen to, Spotify can determine a ton of attributes including: The result of all this digging is what Spotify calls “Taste Profiles”, a preference analytics and visualization tool currently available only to employees. The goal was “to understand you as a music fan with a level of depth that neither of us could do until we came together.” There’s so much data, more than the listener even realizes” Lucchese says. “Our most engaged users are coming more than 20 days per month and listening to an hour per session. So The Echo Nest’s first job was to dive into all of Spotify’s data. The key to unlocking that enthusiasm is understanding each user’s unique music preferences so Spotify can suggest them the right song. Hellman explains “The longer people stay on the platform, the more likely they are to pay for premium”, which is Spotify’s real money-maker. Its incentives are aligned so everyone benefits when Spotify sounds better. “To reach every passionate music fan out there, and get casual fans more engaged and more passionate.” Luckily, Spotify’s business model isn’t about selling hardware or search ads. ![]() “The philosophy here is to create the absolute best listening experience” says Lucchese. A lot of people out there claim to be feverish music fanatics, but few foam at the mouth with excitement quite like these two. In an assuming room buried in the office, I meet Spotify’s VP of Product Charlie Hellman, and The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese. Taste ProfilesĪfter a few months of mashing the companies together, the combined music juggernaut gave me a look at what its been tinkering with. So to make sure it knew what people wanted to hear better than any of its competitors, Spotify ponied up $100 million, mostly in stock, to buy the Massachusetts startup. A fundamental building block of music intelligence, The Echo Nest’s vault of meta data and personalized recommendation algorithms powered discovery on Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, SiriusXM, and more. That’s why Spotify acquired The Echo Nest. ![]() So each service is desperately trying to differentiate itself with discovery. Users are overwhelmed with choice, and need curation to sift out the sweetest sounds. But it’s not the size of your catalogue, it’s what you do with it that counts. Spotify has one of the largest libraries, with over 20 million songs and 20,000 more added each day. Three years later, music has become a brutal turf war with Apple/Beats, Google /Songza, Rdio, Amazon, Deezer, and more duking it out for ears. When Spotify launched in the US in mid-2011 with help from Facebook, it was one of the only on-demand streaming services with collections from all the major record labels. The only thing missing from the mural is the huge amount of money, over a half billion dollars, that Spotify has raised to fund this journey. The art gives a sense of the struggle to make digital music legal again after Napster established piracy as the norm. Each milestone is illustrated, from founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon giving birth to the company in Stockholm back in 2006, to musictech curmudgeons Metallica joining the service, up to the modern day when 40 million listeners rely on Spotify. It’s history is chronicled in a sprawling mural in its NYC HQ’s lobby. It’s taken a long time for Spotify to get the basics sorted so it could get to this experimentation phase. Deep inside Spotify’s New York headquarters, the team gave me a peek how the combined company plans to nail recommendations, hook other apps up with legal music, and meld human DJs with algorithms to surface the best songs from the history of recorded sound. Truffle Pig is just one of the new musical inventions dreamed up at the sonic skunkworks born from Spotify’s $100 million acquisition of The Echo Nest. Punch in parameters like “danceability”, date ranges, or emotions and Truffle Pig spits out a set of top jams that would fit your “Lovesick 90s Party Starters” playlist. They call it Truffle Pig, and it’s ProTools for playlists.
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