Spotify Buys ‘Music Map’ Company The Echo Nest

Music streaming giant Spotify has bought music data company The Echo Nest, who were recently behind the maps of American listening habits.

The company recently had a big publicity boost when The Echo Nest's Director of Development Platform Paul Lamere posted a series of maps that track listening habits of American states on his own blog. The Echo Nest themselves have been monitoring the habits of listeners for companies such as EMI, Intel, Twitter, MTV and streaming services Spotify, Rdio, MOG and iheartradio for some time.

Today Spotify – which has a presence in 55 countries – have said that their acquisition will help them develop curation and discovery services on their platform.

“We've been fans of The Echo Nest for a really long time and honoured to have their talented team join Spotify,” said Spotify's founder and CEO Daniel Ek. “At Spotify, we want to get people to listen to more music. We are hyper focused on creating the best user experience and it starts with building the best music intelligence platform on the planet.”

The Echo Nest will remain in its current Massachusetts headquarters and it's API will remain free and open.

On his blog Lamere wrote, “I am incredibly excited about becoming part of Spotify, especially because of what it means for The Echo Nest API. First, to be clear, The Echo Nest API isn't going to go away. We are committed to continuing to support our open API. Second, although we haven't sorted through all the details, you can imagine that there's a whole lot of data that Spotify has that we can potentially use to enhance our API.”