Research seminar by Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest, Spotify)
A brief 18 year career in music understanding
Brian Whitman (formerly co-founder of The Echo Nest, Principal Scientist of Spotify)
In 1999 I put a somewhat stalled electronic music career on hold to investigate how people were discovering new artists. I was especially interested in how very independent and niche music was getting noticed. Could the new methods of digital distribution at the time allow for greater scale and reach of all types of styles and genres of music? Could natural language processing, signal processing and machine learning play a role in understanding music? Two graduate degrees, a few stints in research labs, a startup, seventy employees, fifty customers, a large acquisition, 150 million active users of our technology and eighteen years later, I've left Spotify to focus on something new. I'm giving a brief talk to discuss what I've learned about the field, how big academic ideas translated into the marketplace, and what could be next. This will be a very informal group discussion.
This talk is part of the Tech Transfer Talks of DTIC-MdM Strategic Program.