The Echo Nest Lands in Japan with Music Chef

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Sept. 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, the industry's leading music intelligence company, continues its global expansion with its first partner in Japan: music Chef, a feature-rich streaming radio application available for Android, iOS, and in-car dashboards.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20101214/NE17511LOGO)

Music Chef, from leading mobile and automotive entertainment company ET Square, Inc., is now delivering personalized stations powered by The Echo Nest to millions of listeners in Japan, the second most valuable music market in the world. The new streaming radio app offers free and paid options with music from major western and Japanese labels, and lets music fans enjoy stations based on any artist, situation (e.g. jogging), or as recommended by prominent Japanese recording artists, including Ayumi Hamasaki, Tetsuya Komuro, MINMI, Tamio Okuda, and Fumiya Fujii.

"We're excited to land in Japan with music Chef in cars and on Android and iOS devices," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "This Japanese rollout is a testament to the ability of our market-leading music intelligence platform to easily scale to new music regions and catalogs while delivering best-of-breed features."

Further, these Echo Nest-powered features are available on music Chef in the car, which currently runs on three million dashboards in Japan, with 10 million projected for 2015.

Music Chef's catalog includes Japanese and western artists from all of the major labels and more: EMI Music Japan, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music, Warner Music Japan, Avex Marketing, Forlife Music Entertainment, King Records, Nippon Columbia, Nippon Crown, Pony Canyon, Teichiku Entertainment, Tokuma Japan Communications, and Victor Entertainment.

The music Chef launch is the latest in a series of recent international customer announcements from The Echo Nest. The company continues to add new partners to its marquee roster of leading worldwide music companies and services. Recent rollouts in Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Venezuela, and now Japan, provide a wide variety of deep, robust music discovery experiences customized to each partner's specifications with localized music discovery and recommendation results for fans in each territory.

The Echo Nest's unique approach to understanding both music content (machine listening) and music fans (cultural analysis) has made the company the global leader in music discovery. No other company recommends as much music to as many fans around the world through a global customer base of industry-leading music services.

About The Echo Nest:
The Echo Nest is the industry's leading music intelligence company, providing developers with the deepest understanding of music content and music fans.

Leading music services (Clear Channel's iHeartradio, MOG, Rdio, SiriusXM, Spotify), editorial, video and social media networks (BBC.com, Foursquare, MTV, Twitter, VEVO, Yahoo!), connected device manufacturers (Buongiorno, doubleTwist, Nokia) and big brands (Coca Cola, Intel, Microsoft, Reebok) access the largest repository of music data and intelligence through our open API to build smarter music experiences that help fans to better discover, share and interact with the music they love. The Echo Nest's customer base reaches over 100 million music fans every month and over 400 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform.

Headquartered in Somerville, MA, The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs. Investors include Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.

SOURCE The Echo Nest