The Echo Nest and Thumbplay Partner for Music Discovery Features

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform that helps developers make online music smarter, announced today that it is enabling advanced music discovery for the new Thumbplay Music service.  The Echo Nest is powered by the world's first machine learning system for music that actually reads about music and listens to music everywhere on the web. At http://developer.echonest.com/ developers can easily tap into this deep musical understanding to create more intelligent, engaging and interactive music applications.

The cloud-based Thumbplay Music provides unlimited, on-demand access to millions of songs and is now offered in Beta in the U.S. by invitation-only (request at http://www.thumbplay.com).  Thumbplay and The Echo Nest are working together to offer users a wide range of music discovery and interactive playlisting experiences.  Notably, the new service includes AutoPlaylist, the first mobile application of its kind in the U.S., which allows users to instantly-generate playlists based on a single, selected track.

Thumbplay Music is currently available on select BlackBerry® smartphones and its companion app for PCs/Macs® is available through a downloadable Adobe®AIR® version.  Thumbplay Music is a next generation service, built by experts in mobile content delivery and will be widely available on BlackBerry, Android™ and iPhone® smartphones within the first quarter of 2010.  Today, the service has more than 8 million tracks under license from all major labels and more than 25,000 independent labels.

AutoPlaylist applies The Echo Nest's combined understanding of a song's musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy, harmonic and timbral structures along with cultural attributes such as an artist's popularity and fan base, resulting in the most comprehensive and intuitive mobile playlisting experience available anywhere.  All Thumbplay Music playlists are fully interactive and users can add to, delete or change playlists at any time.  In addition, after discovering a new artist, users can listen to full albums on demand.  Playlists are also available for offline playback when a network connection is unavailable. 

Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest, said: "We are having a great time collaborating with Thumbplay.  Both companies share an obsession with giving fans more immersive, interactive music discovery experiences around Thumbplay's huge music catalog.  We've been very impressed with the speed of product development and the incredible growth in their catalog over a very short period of time."

Added Evan Schwartz, CEO and Co-Founder of Thumbplay: "The brilliant team at The Echo Nest has delivered functionality to Thumbplay Music that has not been realized before on any other mobile service.  Now music fans have all of their favorite functions on one service -- unlimited, on-demand music on their smartphones and PCs/Macs, online and offline play, wireless syncing between devices and notably, the incredibly intuitive, dynamic music discovery tools that we built with The Echo Nest.  People are very impressed when they see AutoPlaylist in action; and, of course, this is just the beginning of our work together."

Thumbplay, which enjoys sustained profitability, has built an award-winning service centered on delivering millions of pieces of mobile content to 95 percent of U.S. devices among every major carrier.  Thumbplay will leverage its existing network of more than 8,000 distribution partners to promote Thumbplay Music.

ABOUT THE ECHO NEST

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company co-founded by two MIT Media Lab Ph.D.s, Brian Whitman Tristan Jehan. Powered by the world's first machine learning platform for music, The Echo Nest makes it easy for developers to build more intelligent, engaging and interactive music applications.  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 three-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. 

ABOUT THUMBPLAY

Thumbplay, Inc. is defining the mobile entertainment experience for U.S. consumers.  Thumbplay.com features licensed music, video and games from some of the world's largest entertainment companies, including: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, as well as several independent labels and artists and video game companies. Headquartered in New York City, Thumbplay was founded in September 2004 by Are Traasdahl and Evan Schwartz. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures, SoftBank Capital, i-Hatch Ventures, Redwood Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Meritech, Brookside Capital Partners and Cross Creek Capital. More information can be found at www.thumbplay.com or at m.thumbplay.com from a mobile phone.

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SOURCE The Echo Nest