The Filter: Team Blog

Happy New Year!

We’re back in the office today, the team here are all drinking dangerous levels of coffee to push themselves through the day and make The Filter the ultimate destination for entertainment discovery in 2009. We’re all rocking out to the new full track radio stations that we’ve managed to blag from our friends at We7. Just go onto any artist page (such as the undeniably awesome Bill Wither’s) and click the gigantic “Start Artist Radio” button to get your own personalized music stream.

There were some interesting stats produced today in USA Today, which looks at how 2008 was a record year for the music industry. It sold more tracks than ever before, a whopping 1.5 billion tracks – but of course, album sales were down by another 14% from 2007. And this is traditionally the industry’s big earner.

In many ways the Industry should be thankful that the downturn is happening now, rather than a few years ago. While a few labels and distributers have gone under (as well as a few music stores) things could have been a lot worse in the dismal years at the start of the decade. Many companies made massive job cuts then and started to readdress business models, so hopefully we wont see Paul McCartney busking again.

Obviously, at The Filter we’ve been feeling the power of the album drift slowly away for a long time. We’ve had thousands of users preferring to make playlists daily with our Mac and PC software rather than listen to that Prog Rock triple album, so I was a little surprised that the decline wasn’t greater than 14%.

Anyway, if you’re looking for some song recommendations today – I think you should try out our Taste Mixer, if you haven’t already. Simply head over to a profile page (here’s our CEO’s – apologies for his dreadful taste in music) You can mix your music taste with his to get song recommendations of things that you’d both like – and you can then listen to a radio station of full tracks. Give it a go, and let me know what you think in the comments.