Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio has been promoting its Pandora-like personalized music ability on CC Radio stations for weeks now. The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering music apps, will be the technology provider to do it.
They’ve announced an agreement with CC Radio under which The Echo Nest’s deep musical intelligence data will be a key element in enabling users of iHeartRadio to listen to and build custom radio stations. The custom radio station features and its new version of iHeartRadio will be unveiled at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas later this month.
The Echo Nest platform maintains over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs, including understanding of artist connections, song similarity, mood, style and detailed acoustic attributes (tempo, energy, danceability, time signature, key) to offer users a fully personalized radio feature.
“Adding The Echo Nest’s data to iHeartRadio’s programming logic enables us to offer our consumers a rich, rewarding experience that scales with our massive library of over eleven million songs,” said Evan Schwartz, who is leading the development of iHeartRadio.
RBR-TVBR observation: A double-edged sword: The more CC Radio stations advertise the Pandora-like app that’s available on iHeartRadio, the more listeners they’ll be driving from their radio stations and online streams. However, to compete with lost ad dollars and listeners Pandora is taking from them, this may be one of the few good options available.
