The Echo Nest is a music intelligence and data platform[clarification needed] for developers and media companies.

The Echo Nest began as a research spin-off from the MIT Media Lab to understand the audio and textual content of recorded music.

[5] Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers.

[6] The Echo Nest was founded in 2005 from the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan[1] and Brian Whitman[2] at the MIT Media Lab.

[18] The Echo Nest has created Taste Profiles based on the listening patterns they notice about a user.

To create these playlists, one of Spotify's thirty-two resident music experts will use the Truffle Pig search engine to find songs associated with a quality or theme.