Peter Gabriel leads $5m cash injection into music website

Peter Gabriel has led a $5m (£2.5m) investment in the music recommendation technology company The Filter to help develop its expansion into new areas such as digital video and film content.

The Filter is a free download that recommends new music and builds play-lists from a user's existing digital music library. Users can enter an artist like Johnny Cash into the engine and the engine will suggest a variety of artists that the listener might like. The service, which can identify around 5 million songs, was developed by the Bath-based Exabre. It has attracted 150,000 users and is adding a further 25,000 a month.

However, Mr Gabriel argues music recommendations are only the tip of the iceberg as the swaths of digital content available online mean that The Filter's software could be used for recommending everything from television shows to bottles of wine and fashion items.

"The first wave of the digital revolution was about the freedom of choice, trying to make everything accessible to anyone, any place, any time. I think the second wave will be about freedom from choice. It will be able to filter and focus so that you get more of what you want," Mr Gabriel said.

He conceded not everyone would want a piece of software recommending what music they listen to or what films they watch, but said, given the amount of digital content online is growing exponentially, many consumers will want to be guided toward content relevant to their interest and tastes.

The investment in Exabre was led by Mr Gabriel alongside technology investors Eden Ventures, and follows an initial $1.8m round of investment by the two parties and The Filter's two founding members Rhett Ryder and Martin Hopkins. The new funds will be used to develop The Filter's technology around television and film content with a view to launching a wider recommendation service next year. "Our new round of investment from Peter and Eden will help us take our recommendation engine to the next level," the company said.

A slew of new technology companies has emerged around the area of recommending digital content, paralleling the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo where users upload their own content on to the web. Most notable have been Last.FM, the British recommendation site that was snapped up by CBS earlier this year, and Pandora, the popular online radio company.

Mr Gabriel, the former Genesis frontman who went on to have success in the 1980s with songs such asGames Without Frontiers, is a pioneer in digital music technology investment. He developed one of the first consumer music technology products - the Xplora and Eve CDRoms - in the 1990s and went on to found On Demand Distribution, or OD2, one of the first music download services, which is used by Microsoft's MSN portal.

By Nic Fildes, Published: 20 August 2007