Digital DNA

Every week there’s a news alert about ‘ad funded music services’ Spotify or We7 reaching new milestones for user numbers. Last week Spotify announced 2 million UK users, this week it’s We7′s turn to announce 2 million unique users.

I am chuffed to bits to see two European-based music businesses growing so rapidly. These guys have clearly demonstrated that there is a demand for free (and legal) music which is effortlessly available on the web/desktop. This demand will ultimately lead to us having access to all entertainment content at any time on any device. There are still many distribution, rights and business model issues that need to be sorted before this happens, but it will happen.

So, once digital distribution has been sorted, the businesses that will thrive will be those who have also sussed out digital demand. In a world where everything is available to everybody at any time and on any device, demand is no longer based on what is available, but on what content is most relevant to us at that specific time. We will need smart filters that serve up relevant content to us based on location, time, entourage, past activity, tastes and mood.

That is why I am so excited about the work that my team is doing at The Filter. For the last 5 years we have been developing recommendation and relevance technologies for all types of digital content that use multiple inputs (consumption data, meta data, location, time zone, social data, etc…) to build models that enable us to work out the probability of what content goes with what situation – by using behaviour and mashing it up with meta data to provide a user with the most relevant content possible for them.

I am very proud that we have proven beyond any doubt that providing users with relevant choices of content leads to an increase in consumption per visit AND an increase in the number of visits because the user finds more content that they like at each visit. Over the last 12 months partners that use The Filter on their sites have seen uplifts in consumption of 15-20% based on increases in streams per visit and visits per week. And for us, it is just the start. As we get access to more data (using location on mobiles) and fine tune our engines, technologies like this will provide better content choices to individuals leading to more consumption.