Raditaz, a Pandora internet radio competitor, is set to announce that its platform is integrating with The Echo Nest, which will add metadata to the 14 million songs available in its music cloud. This would beat out Pandora’s music discovery by fifteen times, bolstering The Echo Nest and Raditaz’ competitiveness in the music recommendation service market, according to an email from the company.
The Echo Nest is powered by the world’s first machine learning platform for music. Based on 12 years of research and development at MIT, Columbia and Berkeley, The Echo Nest music intelligence platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis and machine learning. Essentially, the platform analyzes every song on the internet to isolate key, tempo, rhythm, timbre and other attributes, to better understand the music in the same way a musician would describe it – i.e., “swing groove, tempo = 100 BPM, 4/4 time, key of B Flat, mezzo piano,” etc. The service also combs the web to analyze every blog post, review and piece of text that describes a piece of music, to classify it in real time.
Raditaz stands out in the realm of internet radio in that it combines the best elements of the listening experience – discoverability, sharing, rating, sans ads – with location-based and trending features bringing constructive new features to its platform. The company states that the top five trending tags it’s seen are “home, driving, school, work, workout,” which build playlists on mood instead of artist. The only other platform following suit is Songza, which is another self-proclaimed Pandora competitor.
By partnering with The Echo Nest, Raditaz now lets its users enjoy better personalization than on any other internet radio platform. According to a statement from the company:
Users can create stations with up to 5 artists or 5 songs.
Users can adjust artist and song popularity in order to refine their stations to meet their personal preferences.
Users can now preview their stations to see which artists and songs will be included, and make tweaks based on personal preference.
Tom Brophy, Founder and CEO of Raditaz states, “This Echo Nest partnership is huge, and dramatically improves the quality of the music our users have access to, and their experience creating and listening to personalized music stations. This integration means higher-quality stations, with better targeting, and less repetition – typically major areas of concern across the board with Internet radio platforms. We look forward to building and innovating even further with support from The Echo Nest.”
“Raditaz combines the best elements of the listening experience – discoverability, customization, tagging and sharing,” said Jim Luchesse, CEO, The Echo Nest. “By integrating with The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform, Raditaz now also features the most powerful ‘music DNA’ possible. We hope to deliver a great listening experience to Raditaz users worldwide,” Luchesse added.
Raditaz is also launching an updated version of its iOS app, Android app, and the web version today as well, which will all utilize the new Echo Nest integration.
Below is an exclusive interview with Tom Brophy from January.