Archive for May, 2009
Cool Spotify trick
Ever wonder how deep the Spotify catalog is? Spotify won’t tell you directly, but you can figure it out pretty easily. Spotify lets you search their catalog by date – so a search like this:
will return the entire catalog, which lets you view their stats:
- Total tracks: 3,586,179
- Total albums: 319,106
- Total artists: 264,461
Spotify orders their results (apparently), by popularity, so the search results for this ‘all music’ query not only shows you the size of the Spotify catalog, it shows you what are the most popular tracks in the entire catalog, which happens to be topped by Lady Gaga, The Killers, Beyoncé, and Coldplay. This popularity sort is pretty handy when combined with the year-based seach. You can quickly and easy listen to the most popular songs of any year – here’s the year I graduated from high school: 1977 at Spotify.
With 40K new users signing up every day, Spotify is capturing the music world. It will be really amazing to see what happens if/when they open their doors in the U.S.
79 Versions of Popcorn, remixed.
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on May 1, 2009
Aaron Meyer’s issued a challenge for someone to remix 79 versions of the song Popcorn. So I fired up one of the remix applications that Tristan and Brian wrote a while back that uses our remix API to stitch all 79 versions of Popcorn together into one 12 minute track – songs are beat matched, tempos are stretched and beats are aligned to form a single seamless (well, almost seamless) version of the Hot Buttered classic. I’m interested to hear what some of the other computational remixologists could do with this challenge. Everyone, stop writing your thesis, and make some popcorn!
Listen:
Download: A Kettle of Echo Nest Popcorn.
If you are interested in creating your own remix, check out the Echo Nest API and the Echo Nest Remix SDK. (Thanks Andy, for the tip!).
Music Machinery 