Shazam! The Echo Nest, 7 Digital Take Music ID Open Source With Echoprint

Music intelligence company The Echo Nest has launched Echoprint, an open-source music fingerprint service which  enables the development of apps that identify songs on the go. The Echo Nest is partnering with 7digital to launch with a resolvable catalog of 13 million songs, a number that should grow with the addition of partners. With Echoprint, music identification, once a highly-proprietary technology, now belongs to the community at large.

Free Open-Source Competitor To Shazam

Music identifaction apps regularly rank among the most popular paid offerings in app stores; and just this week, sector leader Shazam announced $32 million in new funding.

Could Echoprint's open source platform lead to dozens of Shazam competitors?  "Echoprint is very different than Shazam under the hood," Brian Whitman, from The Echo Nest told Hypebot. "It was architected from the start to be fast and scalable and to accept new songs from anyone with no degradation in quality of matches. It's meant to be open to the world rather than a curated system."  Shazam has also said that it expects 50% of its revenue to come from related offerings for television networks and advertisers.

Why didn't The EchoNest just create its own app? "The Echo Nest is a music data platform,"  according to Whitman. "We're much more comfortable working on the science and data and letting our beloved community of developers and customers build the best possible experience. We're confident within months there will be dozens of amazing new music experiences built on Echoprint that we'd never even think of."

Some Echo Nest’s partners have already been using Echoprint for 18 months, and now as open-source software, it should improve as a wider variety of developers and partners add their own experience and imagination. A partnership with the open music encyclopedia MusicBrainz will make dozens of existing music resolving apps Echoprint-aware in the coming weeks.