(“It was the style at the time,” he says now, diplomatically.) Was there a way to convert this flowery writing into usable data? If a music critic or a kid on a random blog wrote that a new indie band sounded like “David Bowie when he was in Berlin,” Whitman wanted to craft a way to algorithmically map that connection. He once studied Pitchfork reviews to measure their ratio of actual music criticism to personal musings about the writers’ lives. Whitman was fascinated by the way people describe and write about music. But the two men wanted to tackle the problem in different ways. Tristan Jehan, another Media Lab student, was also intensely interested in the ways machines could be used to organize music. He decided to enroll in a doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in 2001.Īt a conference the next year in Sweden, the birthplace of Spotify, Whitman met his musical match. But as he was working New York nightclubs, Whitman was also cultivating an interest in computer science, particularly machine learning. According to Whitman, Faith No More frontman Mike Patton once called him “the biggest geek he’s ever met.” His song “ Catgut Kelly Hears the Tone” is the sound of a superintelligent alien species turning on their dial-up internet, with a bass line that Blitter believes worthy of a Gucci Mane track. In the late ’90s, Blitter (real name: Brian Whitman) was a New York musician specializing in IDM (intelligent dance music), an electronic subgenre known for its unconventional sonic arrangements and computerized bleeps and bloops. T o understand how the Echo Nest came to play a pivotal role in the way we listen to music, you need to first know about Blitter and the James Brown Machine.
Can an algorithm - even a really, really good algorithm - replace them? Nesting Period But now the question is whether that perk will be enough to satisfy users missing out on music and album launches from superstars such as Swift, Beyoncé, and Drake. Thanks to the Echo Nest, Spotify is now better than any other streaming service at helping users discover new songs they might love. Spotify’s answer to these glaring omissions? Algorithms. And Spotify users have it particularly rough, with many of the year’s best-selling albums showing up on the service late, or not at all. In one case, a frustrated fan resorted to filing a lawsuit against an artist. As more streaming services have entered the market - most notably, Apple Music and Tidal - major artists have started brokering deals to keep their work on certain platforms and off others. These features, centered on personalization, are part of Spotify’s big bet that crafting killer, user-friendly playlists will keep its followers loyal.īut in the age of streaming album exclusives, loyalty can be tough to come by.
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Echo Nest alums have conceived and shepherded virtually every major product update Spotify has rolled out over the last year, from Discover Weekly to its Running mixes. There’s no specific star or revolutionary business plan behind this success: In large part, its growth is thanks to the Echo Nest, a music data start-up that Spotify acquired just months before Swift’s exodus. But the streaming service experienced its biggest growth year ever in 2015, adding 29 million active users. More than a year later, Swift’s music is still nowhere to be seen on Spotify. So when the pop superstar decided to pull her entire catalog from Spotify in 2014, citing issues with how the company compensates artists, it looked like a massive blow for the world’s largest paid music streaming service. Your tour may be canceled, or your romantic failures could be blasted on the radio, or you might have to work on a Sunday. Y ou do not want to get on Taylor Swift’s bad side.
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