Jazzwhatever

Various Artists

Pop Sound 70

@1970 Germany Pressing

*****

Peter Watts, winner of The Echo Nest’s Social Music App Challenge and Music Apps Hack Weekend, has been building incredible stuff using The Echo Nest APIs for quite some time. Now, he and Swarm.fm co-founder Andrew Dever have gone pro, so to speak, with the Swarm.fm Spotify app, launched today.

Any of Spotify’s 15 million-plus users can install the Swarm.fm app in their desktop clients with a single click from the Spotify App Finder. Once they do, they’ll enter a rich musical universe of social music that lets them do things they’ve never been able to do before, all in the same place: listen to all what all their friends have been listening to on any Facebook-Connected music service, and turn just about anything they see in the app – tags, friends, artists, years, and more – into a streaming radio station that understands their musical taste, in addition to being able to play it all on-demand. (More details and a demo video are available here.)

Yes, Swarm.fm analyzes what’s in your Spotify playlists, your local music library, your listening history, and your own Facebook music behavior to filter what all of your friends have been listening to so that it makes sense for you, personally. The magic behind this feature is our groundbreaking Taste Profile technology, which builds a unique understanding of anyone’s music taste and lets developers apply it to any set of music.

We expect big things from Taste Profiles, and Swarm.fm is one of them. In addition to our Taste Profile API, the new Swarm.fm Spotify app taps into our playlist technology to build a mix around any tag within the app, and our artist data to build the rich artist pages in the app for every artist.