Music intelligence startup Echo Nest, which you might know better as the company powering Spotify Radio and Vevo’s recommendations, is announcing two new partnerships today which will give developers access to more data to build their apps with. The company is teaming up with JamBase, which provides concerts listings and tour schedules, and SongMeanings, which you’ve surely come across while Googling to find out what the eff that guy is actually singing about.

The new services will become part of The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone project, essentially a data resolution service aiming to offer a common language to music applications. Currently, the platform includes lyrics from LyricFind and musiXmatch, music from Spotify and Rdio, tweets from artists on Twitter, concert tickets from Seatwave, and links to relevant Facebook pages.

Specifically, JamBase will integrate its artist IDs into Echo Nest’s API, to make its concert listings available. At present, JamBase says it has access to the show listings for 80,000 artists across 50 genres who perform in 100,000 venues worldwide.

SongMeanings, a community-oriented website for discussing the meaning behind a song’s lyrics, reports having 2 million lyrics with over 1.7 comments available in its database.

While Echo Nest isn’t yet announcing any of its companies on its API will be rolling out support for the new additions, it certainly would make sense for music streaming apps to continue to make their apps more intelligent and feature-rich in the future.

In addition to Spotify and Vevo, The Echo Nest has deals with Nokia, EMI, and Clear Channel. Companies building on top of its APIs also include MOG, the BBC, MTV, and Discovr, to name a few. The Echo Nest is backed by $8.31 million in funding from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital.

VEVO launched officially to the world in December 2009, and in the same month became the most visited music site in the U.S. That was just over two years ago, and today VEVO has grown to be the second largest web video property behind YouTube, with some 51.5 million unique viewers tuning in to VEVO’s content in January, according to comScore.

The concept behind VEVO was to make it the Hulu for music videos, and with the company being a joint venture of Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media, with EMI licensing its music to VEVO, it has content from three of the “big four” record labels — and, thus, has had the clout to push it to the fore. Its videos are syndicated across the Web, with many of them appearing on YouTube thanks to the company’s deal with Google/YouTube in which the two companies sharing the significant advertising revenue generated from those videos.

Yet, as CNET reported last month, VEVO has reportedly been in talks with Facebook over moving its videos to the social network, as Facebook is interested in arranging a similar deal with VEVO to the one it has with YouTube, but a year remains on VEVO’s contract with YouTube, so those talks are still preliminary.

However, last week, news started to trickle out in the form of emails to VEVO users from management that, going forward, VEVO users would begin logging into the site exclusively through Facebook. The emails included news that a “new VEVO is coming,” which is confirmed today, as VEVO is officially announcing the biggest redesign to its music video platform experience since launching two years ago. And Facebook definitely has a significant place in the new redesign.

In a blog post to VEVO users, the company’s SVP of Product, Michael Cerda, said that he had long been in conversations with CEO Rio Caraeff about turning transforming VEVO from a website into “an experience,” which has come to form in a redesign that looks to boost the site’s personalization features, its social functionality, and make it more of a long-play video destination.

Under the new redesign, when users login to VEVO using Facebook, the site scans your newsfeed and daily Facebook data to create a personalized Facebook playlist. What this means is that if you’ve liked an artist or shared music before on Facebook, for example, VEVO will add that artist’s videos to your playlist automatically. Login, by the way, is limited to Facebook, but users aren’t required to login or register to access unlimited viewing/listening.

VEVO’s iTunes Match will also scan your iTunes library to create a playlist of music videos that matches your most listened-to artists, in addition to the ability to search for a video, watch it, and have VEVO create a “long-play viewing experience based on the stuff you’ve selected,” the SVP said.

The company is also announcing that it has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to help users find and discover music videos personalized to their personal preference. The integration of the Echo Nest’s music data platform into VEVO now lets fans create personalized music video playlists from its catalog of more than 45,000 videos.

Fans can also further customize their listening experience by scanning their audio music collection using a web link, at which point VEVO and Echo Nest turn the site into a sort of thematic music video platform, with content played based on the user’s favorite music.

On top of that, the company has also updated its player, which is now bigger, and (from my brief experience) plays videos faster — and continuously. The other big update to VEVO’s platform comes in its contextual changes. When listening to music, especially when discovering new music, our experience is enhanced significantly by being able to check out more information on the artist, biographical or otherwise.

VEVO’s viewing experience now includes the ability to check out lyrics (thanks to musiXmatch) to the song in the video as you watch, browse news headlines related to the artist, or read the artist’s bio without having to click away from the video. The cool thing is that the company has not only updated VEVO.com, but its iPhone, Android, Facebook, and new Xbox app (U.S. only) as well. (An iPad app is on its way.) So, this means that you can listen to VEVO while at the office, share with your Facebook friends, and continue streaming music videos on your smartphone, and connect it to the TV when you get home.

The new VEVO now gives users a viewing and listening experience that they will actually want to take with them across platforms, and on the go. It makes the experience more competitive with Spotify and Pandora than before, with the added benefit of videos. And, as to ads, always a potential deal-breaker for streaming content, ads on the site continue to be pre-roll, overlay and companion on VEVO.com, and pre-roll on mobile. The pre-roll runs about every 7.5 minutes of viewing time, and not before the first video.

And to clarify, continuous video streaming on site and for iPhone, Android, and Xbox are part of this update.

That being said, the team was clear to point out that this is really a beta launch, and it will be making further updates according to user feedback. Hopefully, as the company is a joint venture of some of the largest bodies that constitute the RIAA, they’ll also be listening to feedback in regard to its somewhat questionable stance on piracy and the events that transpired at Sundance, where Jason found more than a little suspect activity.

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.