For a long time now, Spotify has had its own Radio experience, but, to be honest, it hasn’t been very good. Then, last week, the Swedish-turned-America music service announced that it was redesigning its radio experience from the ground up, offering unlimited stations and unlimited “skips”. And it’s no mistake that, during his presentation of the new Spotify Radio, CEO Daniel Ek happened to compare his app to Pandora.

Since its IPO, Pandora has been on a kick, but Spotify is doing everything it can to continue nipping at its heels and has added 7 million new users since integrating with Facebook at f8.

At the end of November, Spotify hosted its first big American event, announcing a “new direction” for the service. A big part of this is Spotify’s new platform for third party developers, who are now able to integrate Spotify’s massive collection of music into their own apps.

And today, Spotify will begin officially rolling out “Radio” to its users on top of its new app platform. But, what Spotify hasn’t been talking about until today is what kind of technology is powering its awesome redesigned Radio functionality.

Enter: The Echo Nest, a music intelligence startup whose technology powers many music apps from media companies and independent developers. The Echo Nest is now providing its music intelligence technology to power intelligent radio and radio playlisting within the new Spotify Radio app as it rolls out today across the country.

Given The Echo Nest’s relationship with app developers and record labels (it recently partnered with EMI to open its catalog to app developers), this relationship makes a lot of sense. The Echo Nest will now essentially be powering Spotify Radio, allowing users to create personalized radio stations based around songs or artists in Spotify’s roster of over 15 million tracks.

Partnering with The Echo Nest allows Spotify to enable users to build playlists dynamically around any song or artist for a far deeper radio experience than Spotify has offered previously. As The Echo Nest has one of the more sophisticated playlist engines out there, combining this playlist intelligence with Spotify’s huge catalog and deep social integration should definitely give Pandora pause.

Users will be able to find Spotify Radio located within Spotify Apps, which will now be available to users of its free service as well as Unlimited and Premium Subscription users.

For more, check out Spotify at home here or The Echo Nest at home here.

The Echo Nest, a music intelligence startup whose technology that powers many music apps from media companies or independent developers, this morning announced the release of an open-source music identification service dubbed Echoprint.

The Echo Nest teamed up with 7digital, a London-based digital media delivery company, and MusizBrainz, to launch with a catalog of 13 million songs, an amount it expects to grow fast.

Echoprint will basically allow third-party developers to help music fans identify the music that’s playing around them, free of charge, from within their own applications and services.

This should perk the ears of everyone over at music discovery company Shazam, which provides a similar but closed service and just raised a $32 million round.

As The Echo Nest puts it, music identification now “belongs to the community at large”:

Music identification apps regularly rank among the most popular paid offerings in the iTunes, Android, and other app stores. Every music fan wants to identify the songs they hear, read up on the artists who made them, and tag them for future listening or purchase. They also want everything their personal music collections to be properly labeled.

Thanks to the open-source Echoprint, music fans will get both of these things within a much wider variety of apps.

The Echo Nest says the music fingerprinting technology isn’t new and has been in use by its partners for 18 months already, but Echoprint will be completely open source.

The company posits that not only music identification or related apps will benefit from Echoprint, but also social networking and location-based service providers.

Coincidentally, I’m visiting The Echo Nest’s offices near Boston next week, so I hope to learn more about the technology and how the company is doing in general then.

The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform, which was created by two MIT Media Lab PhD students, intelligently interprets audio signals and can tell when a song belongs to the blues genre rather than a techno genre. And they can detect musical characteristics like tempos, transition types, and harmonies.

The startup’s technology powers music applications for developers in digital music who are looking to understand music content (10 million songs online, 3,000 new songs and 15,000 music reviews added online daily) and deliver knowledge around this music. The company’s suite of APIs allow for music discovery, interactive music games, remix apps and analytics-driven music marketing applications.

Echo Nest’s API is used by both Spotify and MOG to intelligently suggest music to users.

“Machine Listening” is the idea that computers can be programmed to interpret audio signals the same way humans do. This means that they can tell when a song belongs to the blues genre rather than techno. And they can detect musical characteristics like tempos, transition types, and harmonies.

The technology has some obvious practical uses. It could be used to compile collections of music with the same sound or with similarities to the music someone already knows they like. Applications could also be designed to create the perfect mixtapes, with songs picked and ordered in just the right ways.

The Echo Nest is a company that’s bringing machine listening to Web 2.0. It was founded by two MIT PhD students and is supported by a government grant. Today, the company releases the first of several “Musical Brain” APIs intended to improve three main aspects of music-related web services: search, recommendations, and interactivity.

The first API, which focuses on signature analysis and is being released through Mashery, can be used to retrieve an XML file with information about a particular song. A proof of concept website called This is my jam has been set up to demonstrate its capabilities. Load up a few of your favorite artists and it will automatically arrange songs from them in an order deemed most suitable given their audio characteristics.

The Echo Nest will lend all of its APIs to non-commercial projects for free, but it will charge commercial sites with a usage fee. The company plans on showcasing a website for each of its APIs, but it doesn’t currently have any plans to create a consumer destination of its own with the tech.