The Echo Nest and Songkick Partner to Help Fans See More Concerts

SOMERVILLE, Mass. and LONDON, April 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter apps across the web and devices, has expanded its unique Rosetta Stone platform to include Songkick, the leading live music concert database that helps millions of fans around the world to find out when the artists they like are playing near them.

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Using Rosetta Stone, our data translator for music services, developers can summon up precise elements from a variety of sources to include in apps. It lets them connect the dots between artists and songs on services including Spotify, Rdio, Twitter, Facebook, LyricFind, Musixmatch, many others, and now, concert industry innovator Songkick, the largest single source of live music data on the web.

Songkick is already used by millions of music fans to analyze their music collections and track bands to find the shows that matter to them, then buy tickets. Songkick's concert information is integrated into all the places where people discover music including foursquare, Spotify, YouTube, and VEVO.

The Echo Nest is proud to make Songkick's data available to app developers (and ultimately to music fans) through Rosetta Stone, considering our long history with the company. We've worked extensively with Songkick during Music Hack Days, where developers have been able to play with both APIs.

Thousands of developers already use the Songkick API to create apps that are extremely popular with users such as Gigbeat, Kickalert, and Venue.FM. Now, developers all over the world will find it easier to add Songkick data alongside everything else in Rosetta Stone.

What does this mean for app developers, and by extension, the music industry? Apps of all kinds on every platform will be able to include Songkick's extensive concert data with total reliability, safe in the knowledge that they're including the right tour dates for the artists.

"The majority of Songkick's team are developers passionate about making concert-going easier, so investing in our API and developer community is a priority for us," said Ian Hogarth, Songkick CEO and co-founder. "We believe this will unlock further breakthroughs in concert technology. We're really excited about the range of awesome apps built on top of Songkick's data at Hack Days around the world so far and hope this integration with The Echo Nest leads to many more people seeing what they can build with our data."

As a result of this partnership, music fans will find it much easier to learn about their favorite bands' tours in their hometown or a city they might be visiting. This is no trifling matter: With artists earning a significant proportion of their income from touring, ticket sales are increasingly important to the music industry. By using Songkick's integration into The Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone, more music fans will hear about concerts before tickets go on sale. This is good news not just for fans but for artists too.

Thanks to Songkick's integration into The Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone, more music fans will see more concerts. And we're all for that.

About The Echo Nest
The Echo Nest powers smarter music applications for leading media companies and thousands of independent developers, with a customer base that reaches over 150 million music fans every month.  Over 340 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform.   With the world's only machine learning system that actively reads about and listens to music everywhere on the web, The Echo Nest opens up the largest repository of dynamic music data in the world – over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs -- to help developers re-shape the experience of playing -- and playing with -- music. A four-time National Science Foundation grantee, the Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs.  Investors include Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and three co-founders of MIT Media Lab.

About Songkick
Songkick, the second-largest live music destination on the web, helps bring fans and artists closer together. Winner of a Webby Official Honoree award in 2012, the company was recognized by Music Week as the Best Consumer Digital Service in 2011, and by Billboard Magazine as one of the Top 10 Digital Music Startups of 2010. Songkick makes it easy for fans to track their favorite artists so they never miss them live. Songkick aggregates artist, concert, festival, venue, and ticket information from across 70 countries, so fans can receive personalized alerts for upcoming shows in their town and find the best ticket offers. Fans can use Songkick to share their concert plans on other social networks. Songkick's live music information is distributed across a network of partners including Bandcamp, foursquare, MTV, VEVO, Warner Music Group and YouTube through their API. Songkick is backed by Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Y Combinator as well as angels from the technology and music industries. Experience Songkick at www.songkick.com, on the iPhone and on Spotify.

SOURCE The Echo Nest Corporation