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Spotify and The Echo Nest team up to offer better music recommendations

Spotify and The Echo Nest team up to offer better music recommendations

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Spotify has teamed up with The Echo Nest to give developers the tools to provide better music recommendations within Spotify apps.

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Spotify hands-on
Spotify hands-on

Better recommendations are something of a white whale in the entertainment world — Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could improve its recommendations by just 10 percent, and Pandora's built an entire company on reliably picking songs you'll want to listen to next. Spotify has similar aspirations, and has teamed up with "music intelligence company" The Echo Nest, merging their APIs in order to give developers the tools to code recommendations into apps for Spotify's nascent platform. The Echo Nest's engine is a lot like Pandora's Music Genome, and its recommendations algorithm has been at work in Spotify's radio features for a while now; it also powers apps like SpotON Radio, but now any third-party developer can use its tools as well inside Spotify apps.

The Echo Nest's "Rosetta Stone" also automatically connects artists and songs with relevant lyrics, tweets, reviews, and information. It should make it easier for Spotify devs to personalize apps, create automatic playlists, or just tell you more effectively what to listen to next. Of course, we haven't been exactly impressed with Spotify's radio features — just because we listen to a little Taylor Swift doesn't mean all we want is Katy Perry, forever — but hopefully developers can find some interesting ways to implement the technology.