If there’s a company that sums up the new, data-driven direction music is headed in, it’s The Echo Nest. Now the US company, which offers a simple way for developers to work with deep, rich metadata about songs and artists, has boosted its international growth strategy by hiring two executives away from the kings of media metadata, Gracenote.
John Sierotko, formerly Gracenote’s SVP of Worldwide Sales & Marketing, has joined The Echo Nest as Chief Revenue Officer. Meanwhile, Scott Ryan is now VP of Sales, having previously been VP Sales for the Americas at Gracenote.
The hires follow The Echo Nest’s $17.3 million Series D funding round last summer, which was raised in order to boost the company’s international sales and marketing drive. The application of data to improve products for both consumers and the businesses is a hot topic in the music industry right now. Just look at Semetric’s $4.7 million round, announced earlier today, for more evidence of that.
The Echo Nest partners with a number of high-profile API providers, including Twitter, Spotify and Seatwave, to allow easy integration with its own rich database of music data. In a blog post distributed to press ahead of today’s announcement, Sierotko singles out The Echo Nest’s Taste Profiles feature, which can offer recommendations to users based on their behavior, as a key competitive advantage, allowing developers to easily offer increased personalization. Sierotko notes that advertising (which in the connected TV world is set to become more personalised) is a particular opportunity for the company.
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Sierotko’s LinkedIn profile notes that he started at The Echo Nest this month, while Ryan’s lists his start date as December 2012.
Note: This post has been updated to correct Scott Ryan’s most recent job title at Gracenote.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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