Jeff Bronikowski, who less than a year ago left Yahoo Music for AOL Music, has in turn left for a newly created position at the Echo Nest, according to a report in AllThingsD.
Bronikowski is now overseeing corporate development for the Boston-area startup, which offers a development platform for music app developers. The Echo Nest is perhaps best known for powering many of the apps created through the Music Hack Days it sponsors, but it’s also behind many large-scale operations as well. That includes MOG’s music recommendation engine, and most recently the personalized radio feature offered by the revamped iHeartRadio app from Clear Channel. Bronikowski will be charged with landing more such partnerships.
Q&A: The Echo Nest Ceo Jim Lucchese
At AOL, Bronikowski was VP and head of music. AOL Music was once a force in online music streaming and discovery, but of late has been outpaced by smaller, nimbler and more innovative startups. AOL shut down its entire music operations internationally, leaving only the U.S. portal retaining music content.
While AOL remains in the top 5 Web properties in terms of overall traffic, according to Comscore, it is no longer in the top 5 in terms of video traffic, outpaced by YouTube (naturally), but also Vevo, Facebook, Viacom (MTV) and Microsoft. The company recently added Slacker’s premium subscription service to augment its existing personalized radio service, the latter of which receives around 3 million unique visitors a month according to company data. Pandora, meanwhile, gets around 12 million unique monthly visitors, according to Compete.
It’ll be worth watching to see what decisions AOL makes with what remains of the unit. Lisa Namerow is replacing Bronikowski in overseeing the AOL Music content sites, while Geno Yoham is taking over the company’s Winamp services, according to the AllThingsD report.
Previously, Bronikowski was head of music at Yahoo, but is perhaps best known in the music industry from his 12-year stint as senior VP of business development at Universal Music Group.