Tuesday, September 9, 2008

VCs want 'more cowbell' as they fund online musical brain maker Echo Nest

The Echo Nest Corp., which makes a “musical brain” application that crawls the web for users to identify all kinds of information related to music, reports it has landed its first round of venture capital from Commonwealth Capital Ventures and other unnamed investors.

The Echo Nest’s software combines large-scale web crawling, data mining, language processing and audio analysis to read about music, listen to music and identify online music trends. The company also released its “developer’s nest,” a group of music-analysis software tools available to website developers, including artist information, music search, music recommendation, audio analysis tools, remix applications, mashups and analytic tools. Also among the tools was morecowbell.dj, a site that allows users to mix audio clips of a cowbell and Christopher Walken’s lines from the “Saturday Night Live” Blue Oyster Cult skit into an uploaded song.

The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab researchers Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan. The company would not disclose the amount of the deal, though a spokesperson described it as a “typical venture round.” The Somerville-based company plans to use the funding to further develop its music intelligence software platform, and expand its marketing, sales and business development efforts. Under the deal, Commonwealth Capital will take a on the company’s board, the Echo Nest said.

In May, the Echo Nest won a $500,000 Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation. In April, the company released its first application programming interface, called Analyze, and demonstrated in the website thisismyjam.com.