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A new developer site participating in the DEMOfall 08 conference, offers open and direct access to The Echo Nest’s “Musical Brain”. The Echo Nest, is a music intelligence company which provides enhanced music search for its users, along with recommendations and interactivity technology. The web-service launched its developer website, providing the development community with the freedom to tap into The Echo Nest’s Musical Brain. It opened more than 30 developer tools for music websites.

The project is based on a 12 years of research done at MIT, Columbia and UC Berkeley. The Musical Brain, a fully automated learning platform machine that has an in-depth understanding of cultural as well as acoustic factors that inform music preference. The company stated that it raised its first round of venture financing recently. Although the size of the deal was undisclosed, it was led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, whereas Angels also participated.

Competitors include: All Music Guide and Muze. Currently the similar services offer only a portion of the tools necessary to fully understand music, across the web. Whereas the Musical Brain covers all that by:

• Listen to music & understand every song, the same way a musician or artist would,
• Read about music; understand what the world knows about every artist, album and song,
• Learn current trends in music; understand music behavior across the web and also predict new music trends

The Echo Nest gives access to Musical Brain through developer.echonest.com, thus through an open API architecture, acts as a software equivalent of a hardware store for developers. The service is a complete repository of easy accessible tools that will churn up the creativity of anyone looking to create or enhance websites possessing musical content.

These tools have a variety of options allowing users with:

• In-depth artist information,
• Music search,
• Music recommendation,
• Remix applications,
• Mash-up,
• Analytic tools

With these tools Echo Nest empowers developers to innovate and change the way users discover and interact with music through their applications.

Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest states:

Because so much music content is available on so many sites, content today is becoming more of a commodity and what sets sites apart is the consumer experience.

The tools at developer.echonest.com offer any music site plug-and-play access to an incredible platform – by opening access to our Musical Brain, we hope to advance innovation in online music, powering the next wave of cutting-edge music sites.