The Echo Nest reels in Songkick data to help music fans see more concerts

Music intelligence platform The Echo Nest has announced a partnership with live music database Songkick with a view towards guiding more fans to see more concerts.

The Echo Nest has expanded its Rosetta Stone platform meaning that developers can summon precise elements from a range of sources to include within apps, and this now involves Songkick’s data too. The Rosetta Stone is a data translator for music services, helping developers get accurate data for artists and songs to build apps of all kinds across multiple platforms.

The Echo Nest’s main offering is based on its database of around 30m songs and 1.5m artists, which is automatically derived using Web crawling, data mining and digital signal processing. The platform enables developers and media companies to integrate music data across their products.

Last June The Echo Nest partnered with 7digital and MusicBrainz, which culminated in the launch of Echoprint, an open source version of Shazam. And in August, it announced another partnership with eMusic, a digital music service for independent music collectors.

This was followed by a Twitter hook-up in January to let developers link musicians’ tweets to their music, then Seatwave got in with the The Echo Nest too so that developers could integrate ticketing features into their apps, before finally integrating APIs with Spotify last month. Over 340 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform.

Now Songkick, which itself partnered with Spotify last month, is lending its data to The Echo Nest to help spread what is one of the largest single sources of live music data on the Web.

If you’re new to Songkick, it’s used by music fans to analyze their digital music collections and track bands to discover when and where they are performing, and then buy tickets. It aggregates artists, concerts, festivals, venues, and ticket information from across 70 countries, so fans can receive personalized alerts for upcoming shows in their town and find the best ticket offers.

Whilst thousands of developers already use the Songkick API to create apps, such as Gigbeat, Kickalert, and Venue.FM, with The Echo Nest on board, even more music fans will hear about concerts before tickets go on sale.

“The majority of Songkick’s team are developers passionate about making concert-going easier, so investing in our API and developer community is a priority for us,” said Ian Hogarth, Songkick CEO and co-founder. “We believe this will unlock further breakthroughs in concert technology. We’re really excited about the range of awesome apps built on top of Songkick’s data at Hack Days around the world so far and hope this integration with The Echo Nest leads to many more people seeing what they can build with our data.”

The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of two students at the MIT Media Lab, and in October 2010, it secured $7 million in funding to drive its growth. It’s probably also worth noting that Songkick and The Echo Nest have worked together over the years on Hack Days around the world where developers have been able to play with both APIs.