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OD2, the European digital music distributor founded by Peter Gabriel, has launched a music jukebox service…the new service is called SonicSelector, and the software, based on Windows Media 9 series, has just been launched in beta…
(The service was launched at Midem today, by Gabriel AND Brian Eno, and yes, I’ve tons of pictures of the aging Brit turks–besides this officious looking one on the right, of Gabriel with OD2 CEO Charles Grimsdale, speaking on a wet and dreary Cannes morning–but you’ll probably see them here later!)
The jukebox will be licensed to the already existing music stores which use the OD2 platform, including MSN Europe, Tiscali and MyCokeMusic.
Among the features of this new service are:
– On demand streaming with pay-as-you-go capability: the company claims it to be the first of its kind. Until now none of the music services in U.S. or Europe has a la carte streaming, so to speak. It will cost 1 pence per track in UK, and 1 cent (Euro) in the rest of Europe.
– The SonicSelector software has a recommendation engine built in…much like Amazon.com’s collaborative filtering software. It compares what a user has bought in the past, and matches it against the listening habits of others who have subscribed to the service.
– This jukebox also lets users plug in other downloads from other stores, websites or from their CDs
– It has also announced a marketing agreement with RIO MP3 player, which will support the company’s platform. This also marks Rio’s re-launch into Europe, after its earlier attempt in the past few years which didn’t bear much fruit…
The interesting part: the collaborative filtering technology which OD2 has licensed comes from a small start-up based in Bath, UK (whose name slips me..Grimsdale didn’t want to tell me the name of the company at the press conference, but I coaxed it out of him later, and like an idiot, forgot to write it down…all I remember is that it is a Bath-based startup in UK, and the technology came out of University of Bath…if you know the company, send me the name)…the filtering technology uses Bayesian techniques, which are becoming widespread in the spam-filtering area as well…
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