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Rdio confirms it will end Echo Nest alliance
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 12 March 2014
The recently appointed boss of Rdio has confirmed that his company will end its alliance with music data firm The Echo Nest following its acquisition by Spotify last week.
As previously reported, Spotify confirmed it was acquiring the data business last Thursday, presumably in a bid to hone the discovery element of the streaming music platform, and possibly to show interested investors in any upcoming IPO that the company has some of the industry’s best music data experts in house.
But the takeover arguably hinders The Echo Nest somewhat, it having benefited to date by being platform and label agnostic, taking data from and providing insights to a plethora of players in the market. And it seems likely Rdio won’t be the only streaming service not keen on sharing its data with what is about to become a subsidiary of one of its main rivals.
Speaking to CNBC, Rdio boss Anthony Bay said that while Echo Nest had been a good ally in helping his company provide personalised recommendation tools, there are other data partners out there who offer similar services. Said Bay: “As far as we are concerned, they were a good partner, but we have other good partners and we’ll move on”.
Rdio also works with Rovi on metadata elements of its platform, and its thought long-established music data gatherers Gracenote will be courting Spotify rivals who have previously used Echo Nest’s services following the news of last week’s acquisition.
