The business of music is not music. It is using music to sell other types of products, such as jeans and cars. That’s why the new Echo Nest APIs for non-music apps are brilliant.

With the Taste Profile Similarity feature, services can “group like-minded users together by finding the most similar Taste Profiles to any single seed Taste Profile for many interesting reasons.” Additionally, the “affinity prediction” system “uses music preferences as predictive of other media preferences and psychographic attributes.” For instance, Echo Nest experimented with affinity prediction and “demonstrated the correlation between music and political affiliation.”