[brianwhitman]

(again, i'm the co-founder, grain of salt time, but check it out yourself) but The Echo Nest makes amazing similarity judgments and playlists without any of the data that you think Google needs to wait for. We crawl the web and analyze the audio and figure out what people are saying about music and what it sounds like. We don't need usage data at all to make recommendations. No usage data went into the EN results in the OP.

[MikeCapone]

Fair enough, but if their technique is based on mining data from users of the service, then let's wait a little while and do the comparison again.