In a little over two weeks the highly anticipated upgraded iHeartRadio will be released by Clear Channel at a two-day music festival in Las Vegas. The three year old product will be Clear Channel's answer to the wildly popular Pandora which now boasts over 100 million users. A key feature of the new iHeartRadio will be playlist creation. Yesterday it was announced a company called The Echo Nest is providing the technology to power the Clear Channel feature. The Echo Nest has developed an automated "intelligence platform" where computers can listen to a song in three seconds and read approximately 15,000 blogs about music every day. All of that information - 5 billion data points - on over 30 million songs is categorized to help users create customized playlists.
The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese (pictured) told Radio Ink yesterday (LISTEN HERE) his company processed 30 million sings in the last year, compared to Pandora which has categorized 800,000 songs over the past decade. Pandora employs people to do the music research, not computers. The Echo Nest provides similar technology to MTV, The BBC, MOG and Rhapsody. Lucchese was introduced to the Clear Channel management team through a mutual friend, an investor, and he's been working with Clear Channel for months to incorporate the technology into the iHeartradio app.
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