MUMBAI: The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter music apps across the web and devices, and EMI Music, one of the world's leading music companies, have today announced a new initiative to put thousands of legendary songs and other music-related content such as video, photos and artwork in the hands of more than 10,000 application developers around the world. This collaboration represents the most extensive collection of licensed music and other assets to ever be made available in this way, and gives developers a one-stop destination to create innovative digital products for EMI's artists.

This tie-up with The Echo Nest is part of EMI Music's OpenEMI initiative, focused on digital innovation and improving and streamlining the music licensing process for new digital applications in a way that is flexible and adaptive for developers.

The Echo Nest and EMI have created a 'sandbox' for application developers, hosted and managed by The Echo Nest, which offers developers creative briefs and opportunities to collaborate on building apps for EMI's artists including Gorillaz, Pet Shop Boys, Tinie Tempah, Professor Green, Eliza Doolittle, Chiddy Bang, The Japanese Popstars and many more to follow.

OpenEMI also includes music from the world famous jazz catalogue of EMI's storied Blue Note Records label as well as thousands of EMI catalogue tracks from top artists such as Culture Club, Simple Minds, Shirley Bassey and The Verve. Revenues are shared between developers and rightsholders, and EMI will handle all licensing and clearance requirements, and marketing of the apps.

The developer sandbox also includes access to The Echo Nest's massive repository of music information, including over five billion data points about music, and one-of-a-kind developer tools including dynamic playlist APIs, open source audio fingerprinting, audio analysis, and remix software.

The OpenEMI sandbox can be found at http://developer.echonest.com . Developers can register for an API key, and submit application concepts to EMI and The Echo Nest. Approved apps -- both free (ad-supported) and paid -- will be released for the web, iPhone, iPad, Android, and other app platforms by EMI, with the underlying intellectual property in the app retained by the developer.

Jim Brady, EMI Group Executive Vice President Strategy and Insight said: "We're very excited about the potential of working together with The Echo Nest and their network to develop great applications for our artists. We've looked at how best we can improve the process of creating new music applications and the OpenEMI sandbox we have built together as a result is a fantastic resource for tapping the passion and innovation of the best developers in the world."

"Application developers are the future of the music business -- they are the creative architects reshaping the role music plays in our lives," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "We surveyed our community of 10,000 application developers to understand their biggest challenges in building commercial music applications. Music licensing difficulties were the #1 problem developers faced, with assistance in marketing applications coming in at #2. By taking on responsibilities around licensing and putting EMI's marketing muscle behind these applications, OpenEMI is directly addressing these pain points and fostering a more collaborative environment between the established music industry and its future." The companies will unveil the developer sandbox and provide developers with an in-person opportunity to meet with representatives of The Echo Nest and EMI in Cambridge, MA November 5th and 6th.