Got a band? Thinking of starting one? It’s a good idea to check out whether any other band has taken the name—before you get famous.
A new website from The Echo Nest searches a database of millions of bands to let you know if your band name is unique. A quick search yields bad news for bands out of MIT: “Tech,” “The Beavers,” and “The Hackers” are already taken. On the other hand, it seems you can still name your band “IHTFP.”
The Echo Nest—founded by MIT alumni Tristan Jehan SM ’01, PhD ’05 and Brian Whitman PhD ’05—is where big data meets music. The company has developed what it calls a “music intelligence platform,” which synthesizes billions of data points to power music and other applications.
The company’s homepage has active counters to showcase the breadth of its database, including data points (over one trillion as of this writing), known songs (35,198,846 and counting), and known artists (creeping towards 2.6 million).
The company has also spun off another free web app that identifies the opposite of any music genre—a by-product of Every Noise at Once, another free web app that allows you to explore music.
But there’s big business behind this big data—their client list includes the Spotify, the BBC, EMI, Nokia, Twitter, Intel, FourSquare, and MTV.
Loving the concept of indexing all my photos. However, the indexer is first trawling through my music folders and now all the album covers are now showing up as photos. Other than that, the functionality is astounding!