I've been working on a project where I'm building my own 'Echo Nest' type of API to feed it. I didn't want to rely on their API since I felt I could offer something better/different.

With it, I have been slowly putting together a new music discovery site (http://www.musicplexer.com)

It's extremely incomplete at the time, but I'm still building the API the hard way: scraping, analyzing the data, connecting the different sources, and making sense of how it will all go together.

The end result for Musicplexer will be something more than bop.fm, spotify, pandora, etc... I am planning some differentiating features that I don't want to discuss yet! :)

Btw, it's built with Meteor/MongoDB & Mojolicious + EC2/DigitalOcean

And... if enough people visit it, it'll probably die. ;)

Does Echo Nest have any patents in the area of analysis?

That would be my concern about this deal. Not just for you, but for the whole area. I hope this doesn't become more grist for our borked software patent system, wherein this deal mostly benefits only West Texas lawyers and their car dealers and realtors.

Wow, that's a generic list indeed. I may need to come up with some non-scientific way to tell which songs go well together... Maybe I'll have to take into account the current alignment of the stars.

That's an unfortunate-sounding lists of patents.

the description of the patent and what they exactly covers seems to be quite generic in the current context

Rdio's recently launched Stations feature (complete with "Powered by echonest" logo in the corner) is brilliant. It'll be a real shame if it goes away.

Or any other new music startup for that matter. I agree, this is a little disconcerting.

That would suck, but I think what makes Rdio the best of the bunch is it's people-powered discovery system. I don't use the Stations feature and it would probably do just fine without it.

I was thinking the same thing. I love Rdio and I cannot stand Spotify's UI or making everything a playlist.

Spotify has said they'll honour all standing business arrangements, so I imagine Rdio will have time to move to another provider or try and bring it in house.

"We have a rolling one-year contract with you. It's just been renegotiated..."

Are any of those arrangements perpetual? Doubtful.

This was my very first thought as well. I worry they will close it as well. Perhaps they will charge for to use the service in the future?

i use their api to construct my own playlists and am worried too...