Peter Gabriel Backed Online Service Unveiled
June 03, 2008
- Digital and Mobile
By Antony Bruno, Denver
The Filter, an online music and entertainment recommendation engine backed by music legend Peter Gabriel, officially launched today.
The service has been in a beta mode for several months, compiling over 5 million songs, 330,000 movies and is available in 164 countries. The basic premise is for users to identify their music tastes by importing their digital music libraries and Last.fm profiles, and letting the service present a personalized home page of sorts that contains not only recommended music, but also movies and other types of media based on each profile.
Gabriel, who was involved in the product design and planning of the service, says the intent of the site is to mix technology with human interaction applied to a recommendation engine.
"We're trying to integrate the best of man and machine," he says.
While the service is now officially live, Gabriel says the next step is to attract a larger customer base that upload a greater number of preferences.
"The more people that use it, the more data we take in," he says. "The results are going to be as good as the data coming in."
On that end, the company is reaching out to existing music services with vast music profile information already on hand, such as Last.fm. The Filter has no formal relationships in place with any of these service, but Gabriel doesn't rule it out either.
"They are important," he says. "If there is already data you want to share with another entity, you're going to get better results quicker."
Going forward, Gabriel says he's looking for more cross-media recommendations, such as making movie recommendations based on musical tastes, and so on. He says the service is about 70% of where it wants to be with music and 30% with film.
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