A music legend or a tech entrepreneur?

I assume that most of you know Peter Gabriel, the musician and songwriter, who rose to fame as the lead vocalist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel had another successful solo career.

Most of you should recognize his most famous song Sledgehammer, when you click the following link; http://www.petergabriel.com/discography/track/Sledgehammer/1536

Now, something you should not know about him, if you are not extremely interested in digital filtering algorithims and content management systems...

Apperently, almost a decade ago Gabriel imagined a future of infinite choice. He predicted a world in which people would access any entertainment, anywhere at any time and invested in it.

Let's read the story of The Filter from the original source; http://systems.thefilter.com/AboutUs/TheFilterStory.aspx

In 2004, Peter was introduced to the physicist and software entrepreneur, Martin Hopkins. This was a man, who shared Peter's vision, but had also developed a solution. As a passionate music fan, Martin had designed a piece of software to manage his music collection. The programme learned about his tastes and, using artificial intelligence, offered playlists and recommendations.

The two men joined forces with the venture capital specialist, Eden Ventures and The Filter was born... Successful trials of a playlist desktop application and a recommendations website quickly showed how effective and reliable the technology was, even with large volumes and different formats. New user interface tools and applications were launched and vast amounts of consumption and catalogue data were gathered and crunched. The Filter began to attract attention from industry commentators and, crucially, interest from commercial partners grew.

And today...
The Filter uses its world-leading recommendations and relevance systems to help content owners, publishers and aggregators around the world maximise their content and services. The Filter is proven to increase usage and engagement which in turn improves margins... making entertainment services more efficient and competitive. With video, music, applications and games, The Filter consistently out-performs editorial and automated recommendations and crucially, outputs can be skewed or biased to meet specific business goals.
One day, all entertainment will be optimised this way. Until then, The Filter is unique.

Suprising isn't it? This is not only a story of a development of a prospering invention, but also an unknown story of how a music legend can turn into a tech entrepeneur and investor.

Let's see how successful this system and also Gabriel will be in the future. I am sure we will hear more from him and his investments...

For further readings;
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_16/b4174046688330.htm