Good news for music and data nerds everywhere: Spotify has revealed Insights, a new blog dealing with both topics. The product is a result of the company's work with Echo Nest, the planet's predominant "music intelligence" company, which Spotify bought earlier during 2014.
The site will post several articles a week, according to a statement given to Billboard by Echo Nest editor in chief Eliot Van Buskirk, that deal with "looking at the way music has changed over time, whether you can figure out movie taste from music...from weird to really informative about big trends."
The launch of Insights also came with the first post on the blog as well. Based on the amount of research that went into this sucker, it's more than reasonable that only a few posts will show up every week. The first topic takes a look at particular music scenes that developed in one of the three most influential European music cities-Berlin, London and Paris based on Echo Nest's research-and then an examination of how that genre has spread to cities around the world, complete with maps. The post concluded with a list of world cities that are heavy consumers of music from the aforementioned towns, including our hometown of Cincinnati, which surprised us with its apparent affiliation with the London and Paris scenes.
Most assumed when Spotify bought Echo Nest that it would be a strictly business-based endeavor and that's understandable: The company can tell a lot about who listens to what and where thanks to Echo's advanced tracking and metrics, which leads to more effective advertising and curating. Fortunately it looks like we'll get to see some awesome data-driven studies as well.
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