It just got a whole lot easier to deconstruct a million songs.
The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform and Columbia University’s LabROSA (Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio) today announced the launch of the Million Song Dataset.
This freely available resource contains information on a million contemporary popular music tracks for which the Echo Nest provided music analysis and metadata
The reason behind the release of this massive database is to give back to the music information research community and allow others to pursue music mapping ideas without having to “reinvent the wheel” each time by painstakingly building smaller sets of data.
While the dataset contains detailed information there are no audio files; however, the collection includes mapping to 7digital’s library of 30-second samples, which will allow researchers to hear and test their technologies.
The site is being hosted by InfoChimp and funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Echo Nest music intelligence platform is also powering MTV’s Music Meter, Mog and Thumbplay and also recently announced a development deal with Island Def Jam.
Interested parties can click here for the code and instructions on how to use the dataset.