The Echo Nest Powers Nokia's New Free Streaming Music App

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter music apps across the web and devices, is delivering personalized streaming radio on Nokia Windows Phones in the U.S.  The Nokia Music app, powered by The Echo Nest, streams custom radio stations based on any artists the user desires from a 15-million-song catalog.

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Nokia Music will come preinstalled on the Nokia Lumia 710 and Lumia 900 smartphones. Other Lumia users in the United States will be able to install it for free from the Windows Phone Marketplace. The free Nokia Music app includes not only customizable artist radio stations powered by The Echo Nest, but also an MP3 store and live concert recommendations.

Owners of these phones, be they casual or serious music fans, can create their own personal soundtrack using the app's "Create" function, which runs on The Echo Nest's deep musical intelligence. This feature builds instant stations to generate a playlist including (and inspired by) the artists they love.

The Nokia Music app is free of advertisements and requires no subscription or registration. For added convenience, it can also store stations offline on the phone's local memory, to be enjoyed hassle-free on the plane, on the subway, or any time wireless connections might be slow or unavailable.

"The Echo Nest is happy to power artist radio stations in the Nokia Music app, as the company expands its presence on the Windows Phone platform," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "This is another testament to the flexibility of our big data music platform, which can make sense of any music catalog for any user."

"The USA is the most vibrant and competitive digital music market in the world – by a wide margin. We have worked extra hard to ensure our service meets the expectations of the demanding, active and inspired music fans in the USA. I would like to challenge everyone to try Nokia Music and see just how easy and enjoyable the service is to use," said Jyrki Rosenberg, Nokia VP of Entertainment, in Nokia's announcement.

In addition to The Echo Nest-powered stations, Nokia Music includes over 150 playlists programmed by music experts and influencers. If they like their music "live" as well as digital, Nokia Gig Finder lets each user know when the bands that matter to them are going to play in their area.

With the innovative Windows Phone operating system poised for an exciting new version; Nokia's consummate hardware design; and The Echo Nest-powered Nokia Music app, the Nokia Lumia 710 and 900 offer a great choice for U.S. smartphone users -- especially the ones who like music.

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 350 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.

SOURCE The Echo Nest