Archive for category data
The Spotify Play Button – a lightening demo
Spotify just released a nifty embeddable play button. With the play button you can easily embed Spotify tracks in any web page or blog. Since there’s really tight integration between the Spotify and Echo Nest IDs, I thought I’d make a quick demo that shows how we can use the Echo Nest playlist API and the new Spotify Play button to make playlists.
The demo took about 5 minutes to write (shorter than it is taking to write the blog post). It is simple artist radio on a web page. Give it a go at: Echo Nest + Spotify Play Button Demo
Here’s what it looks like.
Update: Charlie and Samuel pointed out that there is a multi-track player too. I made a demo that uses that too:
The Spotify Play button is really easy to use, looks great. Well done Spotify.
Is music getting more profane?
This post has profanity in it. If you don’t like profanity, skip this post and instead just look at this picture of a cat. Otherwise, scroll on down to read about the rise and fall of profanity in music.
Now, on to the profanity …
It seems that every year the amount of profanity in music has increased. Today it seems that every other pop song drops the f-bomb, from P!nk’s ‘Fucking Perfect’ to Cee Lo’s ‘Fuck You’. I wondered if this apparent trend was real so I took a look at when certain obscene words started to show up in song titles to see if there are any obvious trends. Here’s the data:
The word ‘fuck’ doesn’t appear in a song title until 1977 when the band ‘The Way’ released ‘Fucking Police’ . This monumental song in music history seems to be lost to the Internet age. The only evidence that this song ever existed is this MusicBrainz entry. The second song with ‘fuck’ in the title, ‘To Fuck The Boss’ by Blowfly appeared in 1978. This sophmore effort is preserved on Youtube:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3wGresI0S4]The peak in usage of the word ‘fuck’ in song titles occurs in 2006 with 650 songs. Since then, peak usage has dropped off substantially, 2011 saw about the same ‘fuck’ frequency as 1999.
Usage of the word ‘shit’ has a similar profile:
The first usage of the word ‘shit’ in a song title was in 1966 in the song ‘I feel like homemade shit’ by The Fugs, which appeared on The Fugs first album (originally titled The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction). Again the peak year of use is 2006 with 322 ‘shit’ songs that year.
Looking at these graphs, one would get the impression that use of profanity has grown substantially since the 70s and reached its peak a few years ago. However, there’s more to the data than that. Let’s look at a similar plot for a non-profane word:
This plot shows a very similar usage profile for the word ‘cat’, with substantial growth in use from the 70s until 2006 when it starts to taper off. (Yes, ‘cat’ was found in many songs before 1976, but I am not showing those in the plot). Why do ‘fuck’ and ‘cat’ have such similar profiles? It is not because their usage frequency has increased, it is because the total number of songs released has been increasing year-over-year until 2006, after which the number of new releases per year has been dropping off. We see more ‘fuck’s and ‘cat’s in 2006 because there were more songs released in 2006 than any other year. For a more accurate view we need to look at the relative usage changes. This plot shows the usage of the word ‘fuck’ relative to the usage of other words in song titles. Even when we look at the use of the word ‘fuck’ relative to other words there is a clear increasing trend.
Is music getting more profane? The answer is yes. The data show that the likelihood of a song with the word ‘fuck’ in the title has more than doubled since the 80s. And it doesn’t look like this trend has reached its peak yet. I think we shall continue to see a rise in use of language that gets a rise out of moms like Tipper Gore.
Boil the Frog – the unreleased Spotify Version
Update – You are probably looking for this web-based version of Boil The Frog and the blog post about it.
The rest of this article is about the unreleased Spotify Version of Boil the Frog.
I’m at Music Apps Hack Weekend doing my favorite thing: hacking on music. I’ve just finished my hack called Boil the Frog. Boil the Frog is a Spotify App that will create playlists that gradually take you from one music style to another. It is like the proverbial story of the frog in the pot of water. If you heat the water gradually, the frog won’t notice and will happily sit in the pot until it becomes frog stew. With Boil the Frog you can do the same thing musically. Create a playlist that gradually takes your pre-teen from Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis, or perhaps more perversely the Kenny G fan to Cannibal Corpse.
To build the app I built an artist similarity graph of 100,000 of the most popular artists. I use The Echo Nest artist similarity to connect each artist to its four nearest neighbors. To find the path between any two artists I use a bidirectional Dijkstra shortest path algorithm. Most paths can be computed in less than 100ms.
The Spotify Apps API is the perfect hacking platform. You can build a Spotify app that has full access to the vast Spotify music catalog and artwork, along with access to the listener’s catalog. Since the Spotify Apps run in an embedded browser all of your web app programming skills apply. You can use jQuery, make calls to JSON APIs, use HTML 5 canvas. It is all there. Spotify has done a really good job putting together this platform. The only downside is that, unlike the web, it is hard to actually release Spotify apps, but the Spotify team is working to make this easier. I’d love to release Boil the Frog because it is really fun to make playlists that bring you from one music style to another. It is interesting to see what musical neighborhoods you wander through on your way. For instance, I made a Kenny G to Cannibal Corpse playlist. To get there, the playlist brought me from easy listening, to movie soundtracks and then through video game soundtracks to get to the heavy metal world. Cool stuff. If you want to see a playlist between two artists let me know in the comments and I’ll create and share the playlist with you.
I made a video of Boil the Frog in action. Check it out:
[youtube http://youtu.be/Nj6JAxm9aPE]
Update: I’ve just pushed the client code out to github: https://github.com/plamere/boilthefrog
Paul vs. Billboard
Posted by Paul in code, data, fun, The Echo Nest on February 12, 2012
Another weekend, another Music Hack Day. This weekend I’m at Tokbox headquarters in San Francisco at the 3rd annual Music Hack Day San Francisco, where 200 music hackers are building the future of music.
For my hack, I thought I would try to predict who would win the Grammy awards (the annual music awards presented by The Recording Academy) which is being held this evening. To do this, I used the Echo Nest APIs to gather of lots of news and blog posts for each nominated artist. I then peered into the articles looking for mentions of the Grammy nominated items. I tallied up the mentions and combined this with the overall artist hotttnesss to give me a ranked order of each nominated item, which I could then use to create my prediction.
Since Billboard has also made some Grammy predictions, I thought it’d be interesting to do a post-facto comparison on how well each of us predicts the winners – thus the hack title ‘Paul vs. Billboard’.
The hack is online here: Paul vs. Billboard
Be sure to check out all of the other music hacks being created this weekend:
Building a Seatwave + Echo Nest App
Posted by Paul in code, data, Music, The Echo Nest on February 8, 2012
This weekend at Music Hack Day SF, Seatwave is launching their Ticketing and Event API. This API will make it easy for developers to add event discovery and ticket-buying functionality to their apps. At the Echo Nest we’ve incorporated Seatwave artist IDs into our Rosetta ID mapping layer making it possible to use Seatwave IDs directly with the Echo Nest API. This makes it easier for you to use the Seatwave and the Echo Nest APIs together. For instance, you can call the Seatwave API, get artist event IDs in response and use those IDs with the Echo Nest API to get more context about the artist.
For example, we can make a call to the Seatwave API to get the set of Featured Contest with an API call:
The results include blocks of events like this:
{
“CategoryId”: 12,
“Currency”: “GBP”,
“Id”: 934,
“ImageURL”: “http://cdn2.seatwave.com/filestore/season/image/thestoneroses_934_1_1_20111018165906.jpg”,
“MinPrice”: 95,
“Name”: “The Stone Roses”,
“SwURL”: “http://www.seatwave.com/the-stone-roses-tickets/season”,
“TicketCount”: 1810
},
{
“CategoryId”: 10,
“Currency”: “GBP”,
“Id”: 702,
“ImageURL”: “http://cdn2.seatwave.com/filestore/season/image/redhotchilipeppers_702_1_1_20110617124457.jpg”,
“MinPrice”: 45,
“Name”: “Red Hot Chili Peppers”,
“SwURL”: “http://www.seatwave.com/red-hot-chilli-peppers-tickets/season”,
“TicketCount”: 1134
},
We see events for the Stone Roses and for RHCP. The Seatwave ID for RHCP is 702. We can use this ID directly with in Echo Nest calls. For instance, to get lots of Echo Nest info on the RHCP using the Seatwave ID, we can make an artist/profile call like so:
To show off the integration of Seatwave and Echo Nest, I’ve built a little web app that shows a list of top Seatwave concerts (generated via the Seatwave API). For each artist, the app shows the number of tickets available, the artist’s biography, along with a play button that will let you listen to a sample of the artist (via 7Digital).
The application is live here: Listen to Top Seatwave Artists. The code is on github: plamere/SWDemo
The Seatwave API is quite easy to work with. They support JSON, JSONP, XML and SOAP(bleh). Lots of good data, very nice artist images, generous affiliate program, easy to understand TOS. Highly recommended. See the Seatwave page in The Echo Nest Developer Center for more info on the Seatwave / Echo Nest integration.
Controlling the artist distribution in playlists
Posted by Paul in code, data, Music, The Echo Nest on January 12, 2012
The Echo Nest engineering team just pushed out a new feature giving you more control over the artist makeup in playlists. There is a new parameter to the playlist/static API called distribution that can be set to wandering or focused. When the distribution is set to wandering the artists will appear with approximately equal distribution in the playlist. If the distribution is set to focused artists that are more similar to the seed artists will appear more frequently. When combined with the variety parameter, you have excellent control over the number and distribution of artists in a playlist. If you want to create a playlist suitable for music discovery, create a playlist with high variety and a wandering distribution. If you want to create a playlist that more closely mimics the radio experience choose a low variety and a focused distribution.
I’ve put together a little demo that lets you create playlists with different levels of variety and distribution settings. The demo will create a playlist given a seed artist and show you the artist distribution for the playlist. Here’s the output of the demo with distribution set to focused:
You can see from the artist histogram that the playlist draws more from artists that are very similar to the seed artist (Weezer). Compare to these results from a wandering playlist with the same seed and variety:
You can see that there is flatter distribution of artists in the playlist. You can use variety and distribution to tailor playlists to the listener. For instance, you can give the Classic Rock Radio experience to a listener by setting variety to relatively low, setting the distribution to focused and seeding with a classic rock artist like Led Zeppelin. Here’s the artist distribution for the resulting playlist:
That looks like the artist rotation for my local classic rock radio.
Give the demo a try to see how you can use variety and distribution to match playlists to your listener’s taste. Then read the playlist API docs to see how to use the API to start incorporating these attributes into your apps.
The Demo: Playlist Distribution Demo (source)
Have artist names been getting longer?
Posted by Paul in code, data, Music, The Echo Nest on January 7, 2012
On Quora, someone asked the question: Are band names getting longer? To answer that question I used the Echo Nest API to get the top 500 artists for each five year window starting in 1950 and calculated the average name length for each of the artists.
The answer to the question as to whether artist names have been getting longer is a surprising No. The average length of artist names peaked in the period from 1955-1959. This was the age when bands were called ‘XX and the YY’ like Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. Surprisingly, the era of the shortest names is 1990-1994 . The bands “… And you will know us by the trail of the dead” (1994) and “The Presidents of the United States of America” (1993) were really bucking the trend.
And the longest name, and my favorite is 2010’s Tim and Sam’s Tim and the Sam Band with Tim and Sam .
Here’s a chart showing the mean and maximum length over the years.
Overall Longest Names
Here are the longest artist names and their start year:
- 51 2010 Tim and Sam’s Tim and the Sam Band with Tim and Sam
- 48 1994 …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead
- 47 1967 Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band
- 46 1993 The Presidents of the United States of America
- 44 1959 Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony Orchestra
- 43 2000 Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine
- 43 1950 Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
- 41 1981 Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra
- 39 1972 Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force
- 37 2010 Antoine Dodson & The Gregory Brothers
- 37 2005 Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
- 37 1999 Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
- 36 1977 Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine
- 36 1970 Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
- 36 1964 Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band
- 35 2010 RPA and the United Nations of Sound
- 35 2005 Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes
- 35 1975 Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers
- 35 1959 Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
- 34 2010 Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- 34 1978 Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft
- 34 1959 Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony
- 33 2010 RPA & The United Nations Of Sound
- 33 1995 Robbie Williams And Jane Horrocks
- 33 1978 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
- 33 1974 George Thorogood & The Destroyers
- 33 1965 Big Brother & The Holding Company
- 33 1957 Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers
- 33 1955 The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem
- 32 2010 The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger
- 32 2007 The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
- 32 2005 Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s
- 32 1990 Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
- 32 1967 Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
- 32 1962 Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels
- 32 1961 Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald
- 32 1960 Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
- 32 1960 Astor Piazzolla & Kronos Quartet
- 32 1959 Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs
- 32 1954 The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
- 31 1992 Jools Holland And Stereophonics
- 31 1990 Armand van Helden’s Sampleslaya
- 31 1977 Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung
- 31 1976 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 31 1966 Nancy Sinatra And Lee Hazlewood
- 31 1964 Björn Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson
- 31 1963 The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
- 31 1963 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
- 31 1962 Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
- 31 1957 Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
- 31 1950 Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart
Longest Names by Year
1950 – 1954
Longest Names
- 43 Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
- 32 The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
- 31 Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart
- 30 Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes
- 28 The Dutch Swing College Band
- 28 Le Mystère des voix Bulgares
- 28 James Carter & The Prisoners
- 27 Master Musicians of Jajouka
- 26 Los Guaracheros de Oriente
- 26 Los Corraleros De Majagual
- 24 The Dave Brubeck Quartet
- 24 The Charlie Daniels Band
- 24 Lee Andrews & The Hearts
- 24 Gladys Knight & The Pips
- 24 Dutch Swing College Band
- 23 Vieja Trova Santiaguera
- 23 The Oscar Peterson Trio
- 23 Johnny & The Hurricanes
- 22 The Sweet Inspirations
1955 – 1959
Longest Names
- 44 Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony Orchestra
- 35 Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
- 34 Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony
- 33 The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem
- 33 Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers
- 32 Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs
- 31 Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
- 30 Van Mccoy & the Soul City Symp
- 30 Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
- 30 Little Anthony & The Imperials
- 29 Van Morrison & The Chieftains
- 29 Nelson Riddle & His Orchestra
- 29 George Clinton and Parliament
- 29 Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers
- 29 Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem
- 28 John Fred & His Playboy Band
- 27 Rocio Durcal & Juan Gabriel
- 27 Paul Revere and The Raiders
- 27 Cliff Richard & The Shadows
- 27 Byron Lee & The Dragonaires
1960 – 1964
Longest Names
- 36 Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band
- 32 Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald
- 32 Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels
- 32 Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
- 32 Astor Piazzolla & Kronos Quartet
- 31 The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
- 31 Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
- 31 John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
- 31 Björn Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson
- 29 Sam The Sham And The Pharaohs
- 29 Quicksilver Messenger Serv…
- 29 Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
- 29 Martha Reeves & The Vandellas
- 29 La Arrolladora Banda El Limón
- 29 Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas
- 28 Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes
- 28 El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico
- 27 Tommy James & The Shondells
- 27 Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
- 27 Eric Burdon and the Animals
1965 – 1969
Longest Names
- 47 The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band & Kris Kristofferson
- 47 Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band
- 33 Big Brother & The Holding Company
- 32 Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
- 31 Nancy Sinatra And Lee Hazlewood
- 29 Quicksilver Messenger Service
- 29 New Riders of the Purple Sage
- 28 The United States of America
- 28 Gary Puckett & The Union Gap
- 28 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
- 28 Creedence Clearwater Revival
- 27 The Flying Burrito Brothers
- 26 The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
- 26 The Incredible String Band
- 24 The Chocolate Watch Band
- 24 The Allman Brothers Band
- 24 The 13th Floor Elevators
- 24 Country Joe and the Fish
- 23 Van der Graaf Generator
1970 – 1974
Longest Names
- 39 Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force
- 36 Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
- 33 George Thorogood & The Destroyers
- 30 Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
- 30 Grandmaster Flash & The Furiou
- 30 Elvis Costello & The Imposters
- 29 The Ozark Mountain Daredevils
- 29 England Dan & John Ford Coley
- 28 The Love Unlimited Orchestra
- 28 Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel
- 25 The Fabulous Thunderbirds
- 25 Premiata Forneria Marconi
- 25 Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
- 24 The Marshall Tucker Band
- 24 Love Unlimited Orchestra
- 24 Kenny G & Lenny Williams
- 24 KC and The Sunshine Band
- 24 Electric Light Orchestra
- 24 Bachman-Turner Overdrive
1975 – 1979
Longest Names
- 36 Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine
- 35 Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers
- 34 Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft
- 33 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
- 31 Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
- 31 Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung
- 27 Richard Hell & The Voidoids
- 27 Ian Dury and the Blockheads
- 26 Marius Müller-Westernhagen
- 25 Siouxsie and the Banshees
- 24 The Alan Parsons Project
- 24 Television Personalities
- 24 Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds
- 23 Prince & The Revolution
- 23 Os Paralamas do Sucesso
- 23 Evelyn “Champagne” King
- 22 Yellow Magic Orchestra
- 22 Michael Schenker Group
- 22 Martha and the Muffins
- 22 Leevi and the Leavings
1980 – 1984
Longest Names
- 41 Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra
- 29 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
- 27 The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
- 27 Lloyd cole & the commotions
- 25 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
- 25 Frankie Goes to Hollywood
- 25 Fantastic Plastic Machine
- 25 Bruce Hornsby & The Range
- 24 The Jesus and Mary Chain
- 23 The Legendary Pink Dots
- 23 Juan Luis Guerra y 4.40
- 23 Everything but the Girl
- 23 Corrosion of Conformity
- 22 Fields of the Nephilim
- 22 Einstürzende Neubauten
- 21 Red Hot Chili Peppers
- 21 New Kids on the Block
- 21 Katrina and the Waves
- 20 They Might Be Giants
- 20 The Vaughan Brothers
1985 – 1989
Longest Names
- 29 Béla Fleck and The Flecktones
- 26 The Future Sound of London
- 25 Los Auténticos Decadentes
- 24 The James Taylor Quartet
- 23 Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
- 23 Boogie Down Productions
- 22 Manic Street Preachers
- 22 Die Fantastischen Vier
- 21 Toad the Wet Sprocket
- 21 The Smashing Pumpkins
- 21 The Innocence Mission
- 21 The Brand New Heavies
- 21 Steven Curtis Chapman
- 21 Mary Chapin Carpenter
- 21 Hootie & the Blowfish
- 21 Engenheiros do Hawaii
- 21 Donavon Frankenreiter
- 21 Compton’s Most Wanted
- 20 Terence Trent D’Arby
- 20 Switchblade Symphony
1990 – 1994
Longest Names
- 48 …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead
- 46 The Presidents of the United States of America
- 32 Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
- 31 Jools Holland And Stereophonics
- 31 Armand van Helden’s Sampleslaya
- 28 The Brian Jonestown Massacre
- 27 Godspeed You! Black Emperor
- 26 Chester Charles Bennington
- 25 Del tha Funkee Homosapien
- 24 Trans-Siberian Orchestra
- 24 Sixpence None the Richer
- 24 Rage Against the Machine
- 23 Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
- 23 Medeski Martin and Wood
- 23 John Michael Montgomery
- 23 G. Love & Special Sauce
- 22 Harry Gregson-Williams
- 22 Bonnie “Prince” Billie
- 21 The Chemical Brothers
1995 – 1999
Longest Names
- 38 Jessica Simpson duet with Marc Anthony
- 37 Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
- 33 Robbie Williams And Jane Horrocks
- 29 Someone Still Loves You Boris
- 29 Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
- 28 Handsome Boy Modeling School
- 27 Ted Leo and The Pharmacists
- 27 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
- 25 The Dillinger Escape Plan
- 25 Supreme Beings of Leisure
- 24 The All-American Rejects
- 24 Mindless Self Indulgence
- 24 Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley
- 23 The Cinematic Orchestra
- 23 The American Analog Set
- 23 Queens of the Stone Age
- 23 Flight of the Conchords
- 23 DaRude Vs Zombie Nation
- 23 Bullet for My Valentine
- 23 Buena Vista Social Club
2000 – 2004
Longest Names
- 43 Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine
- 26 The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
- 24 Architecture in Helsinki
- 23 The Boy Least Likely To
- 23 The Black Dahlia Murder
- 23 Scary Kids Scaring Kids
- 21 The Whitest Boy Alive
- 21 The Pigeon Detectives
- 21 Streetlight Manifesto
- 21 Death From Above 1979
- 20 The Secret Handshake
- 20 The Polyphonic Spree
- 20 Midnight Juggernauts
- 20 Manchester Orchestra
- 20 Funeral for a Friend
- 20 From Autumn to Ashes
- 20 Bring Me the Horizon
- 19 Theory of a Deadman
- 19 The Beautiful Girls
- 19 Secondhand Serenade
2005 – 2009
Longest Names
- 37 Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
- 32 The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
- 32 Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s
- 30 Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
- 29 You, Me, and Everyone We Know
- 29 The Good, the Bad & the Queen
- 27 dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip
- 27 The Rural Alberta Advantage
- 25 The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
- 25 Does It Offend You, Yeah?
- 24 The Tallest Man On Earth
- 24 The Airborne Toxic Event
- 24 Selena Gomez & The Scene
- 24 I Set My Friends on Fire
- 24 Forever the Sickest Kids
- 24 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
- 23 The Last Shadow Puppets
- 23 Reverend and The Makers
2010 – 2014
Longest Names
- 51 Tim and Sam’s Tim and the Sam Band with Tim and Sam
- 37 Antoine Dodson & The Gregory Brothers
- 35 RPA and the United Nations of Sound
- 34 Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- 32 The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger
- 30 Destroy Rebuild Until God Show
- 27 Pussycat Dolls & Snoop Dogg
- 26 Rend Collective Experiment
- 25 Giorgos Alkaios & Friends
- 25 Frankie Rose and the Outs
- 25 Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir
- 24 Unknown Mortal Orchestra
- 24 Den svenska björnstammen
- 24 California Swag District
- 24 A Pale Horse Named Death
- 23 Young Artists for Haiti
- 23 The Jet Age Of Tomorrow
- 23 Jessie and the Toy Boys
- 23 Black Country Communion
Save Justin Bieber from the death metal
Posted by Paul in code, data, Music, The Echo Nest on January 1, 2012
I just finished my holiday break coding project. It’s a 3D music maze built with WebGL that runs in your browser. You can wander around the maze and sample music and enjoy the album art. It’s like being in 1992 with a fresh copy of Castle Wolfenstein 3D – but with music instead of Nazis. If you wander through the maze long enough you may stumble upon a little game embedded in the maze called ‘Save Justin Bieber from the death metal’. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
The maze uses Echo Nest playlists and 7Digital media (album art and 30 second samples). I used the totally awesome Three.js by my new hero MrDoob. You’ll need a WebGL-enabled browser like Google’s chrome. Give it a go here: The 3D Music Maze.
Update: Bieber Death Metal really exists.
The Million Song Dataset just got 50 million times better
Today Thierry has just pushed out the full Taste Profile addition to the Million Song Dataset. This includes user-play data for over a million users. Specifically the data includes nearly 50 million play count triples (user-song-playcount) for a million users and 385 thousand songs in the Million Song Dataset.
The data is provided by The Echo Nest (awesome company, that Echo Nest). Thierry also hints that there may be a contest similar to the Netflix prize coming soon. Should be a fun way to spend the holidays. Read more about the data here: The Echo Nest Taste Profile Subset.
Artists that called it a day in 2011
Posted by Paul in code, data, fun, The Echo Nest on December 18, 2011
It is that time of year when music critics make their year-in-review lists: best albums, worst albums, best new artists and so on. To help critics with their year-end review, I’ve put together a list of the top artists that stopped performing in 2011 – due to retirement, breaking up or due to death.
I made this list using by calling Echo Nest artist search call, limiting the results to artists with an ending year of 2011. Here’s the salient bit of python:
results = artist.search(artist_end_year_after=2010, artist_end_year_before=2012, buckets=['urls', 'years_active'], sort='hotttnesss-desc')
You can see the list of the 3,300 or so artists that stopped performing in 2011 here: Artists that called it a day in 2011. Thanks to Matt Santiago, master of data quality at The Echo Nest, for coming up with the idea for the list.
In the same vein, I created a list of the top 100 artists (based upon Echo Nest hotttnesss) that became active or released their first recording in 2011.
Check this list out at: Top New Artists for 2011
Music Machinery 
