Grant to support continued development of The Echo Nest's machine learning platform for music and further the company's "Fanalytics" capabilities.

SOMERVILLE, Mass., March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform that helps music companies and application developers make online music smarter, announced it has been awarded a $500,000 Phase IIB SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation.  

Since 2005, The Echo Nest has been indexing and analyzing music fan activity across the web.  The NSF-funded project, entitled "Automated Community and Sentiment Mining for Global Media Preference Understanding" will augment the company's existing "Fanalytics" capabilities, providing in-depth understanding of an artist's existing and potential online fan base.  Commercial applications of Fanalytics include targeted music promotion, demographic and psychographic profiling of artist fan bases and behaviorally - targeted advertising for online music applications.

The Phase IIB SBIR grants are the result of a rigorous peer review by leadings scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, with a focus on the commercial potential of the proposed technology. "With the NSF's help, we are excited to be able to approach  next generation analytics, machine learning and data mining problems that are crucial to understanding music fans and to helping artists find their audience online," says Dr. Brian Whitman, co-founder of The Echo Nest.

ABOUT THE ECHO NEST

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company co-founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs. Powered by the world's first machine learning platform for music, The Echo Nest makes it easy for online music companies and developers to build more intelligent, engaging and interactive music applications using open APIs at developer.echonest.com.  The Echo Nest's customers and partners include leading online music services, record labels and a growing army of the smartest independent application developers in the world.  The company is a four-time National Science Foundation SBIR grant winner and is funded by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and angel investors, including two co-founders of the MIT Media Lab. 

SOURCE The Echo Nest