[proximitysauce]

Spotify acquired Echo Nest in 2014. Spotify was already wildly successful at that point, and were latest in a long line of music streaming services that came before them. They also already had recommendations. It was basically an acquihire and most of the team has already left.

[sdellis]

This is not true. There are recommendation algorithms and there are recommendation algorithms. Spotify's VP of Engineering in the US contacted me in July 2011 due to my work with EchoNest and wanted to know what my experience was. His story was that Spotify was interested in longtail music discovery and recommendation algorithms. I still have my correspondence with him and I'm happy to share if you need more proof.

[proximitysauce]

I believe that they wanted to hire you.

There were a ton of music recommendations available at the time. Every music service had them: Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Last.fm, Mog, iTunes, Grooveshark... Echo Nest's weren't even that good. I don't think they had song level recommendations iirc.

[sdellis]

EchoNest's were the best at the time because they added social data into the mix. They analyzed people's playlists/libraries to generate recommendations when everyone else was using descriptive metadata, audio comparison, or manual curation.

[proximitysauce]

That's incorrect. Most of those services were using collaborative filtering social data to drive their recommendations.