News 

Having successfully broken online music services with OD2, powering many European music downloads channels and bought by LoudEye in 2004, Gabriel sees the next challenge as overcoming the difficulties of choosing through the hundreds of files on your computer.

'The first wave of the digital revolution was about the freedom of choice, trying to make everything accessible to anyone, anyplace, anytime. I think the second wave will in some ways be about freedom from choice. It will be able to filter and focus so that you get more of what you want, what excites, entertains and surprises you,' said Gabriel.

The Filter works by scanning your music collection and analysing the content in order to automatically build playlists for different styles, genres, moods and occasions, simply by feeding it a few songs on which to base the list.

Once you first install the free software, it cross-references its indexing of your own music collection with other behavioural data it has online. Based on this, it uses its algorithm to produce playlists as required.

The system can't currently cope with untitled files, or files that don't have meta data such as ID3 tags. 'That's a tricky one,' marketing director Blair

ADVERTISEMENT

Schooff told us. 'We would look at some kind of electronic fingerprinting techniques to cope with this. We're probably looking to license in some technology for that.'

Right now, the technology works with your existing collection. In the future The Filter will be able to more fully use data on a broad spectrum of music-listening behaviour and suggest songs you don't currently own to enhance the playlists it creates. These you
can subsequently buy, with a cut going to The Filter. The company has already bought in such data from OD2 as a starting point for this, although Schooff insisted that none of this is personally identifiable and that the primary goal is to establish The Filter as being effective and useful to users.

'There's a revenue relationship there,' said Schooff. 'But we want to get users right now. We want to build a trust element which we can demonstrate to them.'

'We're looking at ways to benchmark the quality of our recommendations,' he said, but admitted it's a difficult task given the subjective nature of playlist qualities.

Get it right, though, and you can apply that magic sauce to all sorts of markets. 'We're not just looking at music, we're also looking into other digital media areas, but I can't say too much about that at the moment,' said Schooff.

The quid pro quo of that is the broader the application, the greater the likelihood you'll tread on someone else's toes. There are certainly similarities between something like Amazon's 'other users also bought...' service.

However, Schooff is unflustered by the patent question. 'I don't think that it is patentable,' he said. 'We've looked at patents, but I'm dubious.'

The Filter is available for iTunes on the PC. A Mac version for iTunes and a version for Windows Media Player will launch 10 December. Schoof added that a Winamp version is also in development.