Echo Nest teams with Play.me for licensed music
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Developer platform Echo Nest has signed a partnership with Dada Entertainment’s Play.me service. The deal means that people creating music services using Echo Nest’s tools will now be able to offer music from the Play.me catalogue without having to sign separate licensing deals with rightsholders.
“The power of third-party developer communities have been locked out of music largely because of the rights issues,” Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese tells Billboard. “They don’t know what mechanical rights are. They don’t want to know. They just want to build a great music app and put it in front of the world.”
The downside: Play.me only has deals with two of the major labels: Sony and EMI. Its catalogue is only licensed for the US, and it only allows five hours of streaming a week for individual users – after that, it reverts to 30-second clips rather than full streams.
Still, for startups looking to get music services up and running, it’s welcome news. And that’s good news for the music industry too. “If you want to build a music videogame or build a music Facebook app, you can do it and you can commercialize it and you never need to talk to a lawyer,” says Lucchese.
Echo Nest has provided links to three services that are already benefiting from the new partnership: MusicExplorerFX, Slice and PlaylistPathfinder.
