Music recommendation platform The Echo Nest has been awarded a $500,000 Phase IIB SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation. Since 2005, The Echo Nest has been indexing and analyzing music fan activity across the web. The NSF-funded project, entitled “Automated Community and Sentiment Mining for Global Media Preference Understanding" will augment the company's existing “Fanalytics" capabilities, providing in-depth understanding of an artist's existing and potential online fan base. Commercial applications of Fanalytics include targeted music promotion, demographic and psychographic profiling of artist fan bases and behaviorally - targeted advertising for online music applications, according to The Echo Nest.
The Phase IIB SBIR grants are the result of a peer review by leading scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, with a focus on the commercial potential of the proposed technology. “With the NSF's help, we are excited to be able to approach next generation analytics, machine learning and data mining problems that are crucial to understanding music fans and to helping artists find their audience online." says Dr. Brian Whitman, co-founder of The Echo Nest.
