With the wealth of online content available to music lovers through websites, blogs, news sources, countless social media accounts and artist resources, it can sometimes leave a fan feeling a bit jaded, spending countless hours trawling through the internet’s many endless corners.
But what if you could curate all that woolly list of internet bookmarks, news feeds, and music blogs into one all-encompassing feed? A new Aussie online start-up is touting to do just that, curating the internet’s many music resources and gathering them in one, easy to digest location while offering a unique style of music curation.
Purifier is touted as a music news aggregator, basically doing for online music resources what Hype Machine does for the blogosphere or what Metacritic and Any Decent Music do for album reviews, allowing for a simplified way to follow artists while sharing and discovering new music.
The new online platform works by having users create a free online account, then choosing to ‘follow’ the artists, websites, and blogs they enjoy most and then puts the articles, feeds, and info from those sources “all in one place, creating your own personalised feed,” in Purifier’s own words.
Purifier, which has currently launched in beta, draws from 15,000 content sources and ‘millions’ of pieces of content, but also makes recommendations based on social media connections (through Facebook and Twitter) as well as tailored recommendations based on a ‘global music sharing community’.
The new venture is actually the brainchild of Matthew Gudinski, the Executive Director of Mushroom Group, but he says that Purifier is launching as a separate entity to the music company his father, Michael Gudinski, founded.
“What we’re doing with Mushroom is sticking to our core business, and this sits a bit outside that,” he tells The Music of the new online venture. “I didn’t want it tied to a label or touring company at launch… but everything I do is Mushroom in a way.”
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Gudinski says the aim of Purifier is also in “trying to create a location where friends and like-minded music lovers can interact and share content peer-to-peer,” in a space away from the busy social media network feeds and dedicated blogs, while providing an all-encompassing service that’s offering more than just providing a glorified music news ticker.
In creating Purifier, Gudinski and his team have had to ‘tag’ the internet’s vast reams of information and resources in order to make the customised music news feed effective. “A lot of the content providers don’t tag their content properly,” says Gudinski, “we’ve got millions of pieces of content and we’ve managed to tag 70 percent. It’s an ongoing thing in the back-end.”
As well as the Purifier website, there are already plans to expand the service into mobile apps, including iPad, and Android versions, before the end of the year, with the iPhone version getting the first trial in an initial release on 24th October.
(Image: A custom Purifier news feed.)
There’s also plans to expand the Purifier brand into an “intuitive streaming service” to compete (or complement) the likes of Spotify, Deezer, etc., as well as offering music fan features like “an effortless social blogging service, a sophisticated events guide and much more.”
It’s an ambitious venture to “create a music community” as Gudinski puts it, a new kind of music ecosphere that isn’t looking to replace the already established networks music fans use, but rather relying on the wealth of information that’s already available and instead organising and curating that content. Keeping the service free to users is obviously crucial to Purifier’s success, with Gudinski explaining that the site’s revenue won’t be generated by typical advertising models.
Instead, there’s plans to create revenue streams through song and ticket purchases within the service, while looking to introduce promoted posts – think of Facebook or Twitter’s model of paying to ‘promote’ statuses and posts – in which sponsors pay to have certain content ‘pop up’ in Purifier subscribers’ relevant feeds.
It’s certainly an interesting concept, and with Gudinski’s connections, experience, and resources, Purifier is likely to fare better than the many also-rans of the online music start-up pool. But in a climate where even the might of Twitter’s #Music service failed to ignite interest, while the million dollar re-launch of MySpace also ran into controversy and a muted online response, Purifier is going to have its work cut out for it in carving its own space in a crowded online space.
Head to purifier.com to sign up for free and try the new online service.
