Exclusive: Muru Music launches, advanced tech to rival major players

Muru Music, the Australian music recommendation engine and discovery tool, has launched today with technology to rival digital’s major players.

Speaking to TMN, professional DJ, music producer and Muru’s founder Nicc Johnson, said the free app promotes journeys as opposed to playlists, but it’s not here to compete with streaming’s leaders.

“I used Spotify and Pandora for years,” he said. “I loved the products but there were a few things that bugged me about it. We aim to solve that.”

Muru Music founder Nicc Johnson

Johnson said his biggest issue with the streaming leaders is the fact they don’t allow users to create a preset of a playlist that’s continuously updating, and that playlists are either theme-based or genre-based. There is no playlist that allows users to start with one genre and end with another, taking users through the many genres that connect the two on the way through and there is no easy way for a person to create a personalised experience.

Muru Music (named after the aboriginal word for “path-to’, ‘road-to’ or ‘journey’) has been dubbed the ‘DJ in your back pocket’. Using a genre-based algorithm, Muru is based on the DJ philosophy of beginning with one type of music and finishing with another. It’s designed so that whether you’re an audiophile or a self-professed neophyte, you can create a cohesive and complementary journey of up to six hours through different eras of music.

“There’s a natural progression that happens so it doesn’t feel obvious,” said Johnson. “This is what they call a multi-seed journey. Pandora and Spotify create single-seed stations [based on one artist or genre]. Here every single song finds the song that fits with it perfectly.”

Users can favourite and block songs and artists as they listen; currently no streaming service allows you to block an artist. Muru also lets users adjust the music as you go via four sliders: tempo, energy, popular, and era.

With those kinds of interactions, Muru has an algorithm that learns about your behaviour and updates the song choice based on what you say.

“We actually have a system now where we’ve taught our algorithm, our machine, how to classify artists into genres. We are at the very early stages of Deep Learning” said Johnson.

Muru launches in 150 countries today on iOS with a focus on niche genres like breaks and deep house, and classical music. Interestingly, Muru hasn’t entered the market as a competitor to music discovery services; in fact it uses Spotify’s open API to act as an add-on for the service’s Premium subscribers. Following today’s launch Johnson said Muru will be available on another streaming platform. That platform could be Apple Music, which in February announced its open API for third-party services.

“We see ourselves as a value-adding system to Pandora, to Spotify, to Apple Music and others” said Johnson. “Spotify now has close to 30 million paying customers but the majority are still free, and they’re having a hard time converting them.

“[…] We as a free app can help them convert those users by signing them up through us and offering them Premium for a month or two months. By giving the user a more engaging tool, at the end of their trial they’re more inclined to pay for Spotify Premium.”

The move as an add-on to Spotify means Muru licensing deals are covered under Spotify’s existing agreements with rights holders.

Currently Muru has around 500,000 songs in its algorithm, in just two months it will have around 10 million, 30 million soon after that, and so on (Pandora has 1.5m songs, Spotify has 30 million). Its deep learning system doesn’t rely on collaborative filtering like Spotify, or human input like Pandora. But why then – with budgets Muru can only dream of and an army of developers working around the clock – has Spotify or Pandora not already eclipsed Johnson’s innovation?

“Because our approach has been very different,” said Johnson. “The approach for me has been very much from a DJ point of view. How do I categorise music for myself when I’m DJing? How do I find music that fits together that I can play for a diverse audience? How does a DJ adjust their set to adapt to their audience. And finally how do people interact with music themselves”

“[…] Based on that, we’ve automated a system where if you throw 1,000 artists into a system it identifies which genre they belong in. The reason we did that was so we could take a catalogue like Spotify’s 30 million and work with each track on a deep learning level.

This kind of technology and data has piqued the interest of digital leaders and major record labels alike. In the US Muru is already in discussions with the major labels regarding test runs surrounding a paid tier for that market, while initial talks with the now defunct Rdio and its owner Pandora gave Johnson the cognition he was on to something ground-breaking.

“[Muru’s data] is a lot more specific than what Spotify can collect, because they have little context around it,” Johnson notes. “[…] Pandora, Spotify, Deezer they’re all doing amazing things; but they’re not focused on this technology.”

Amsterdam-born, Ibiza-raised Johnson moved to Australia five years ago; he was working as a music consultant to the hospitality sector both locally and abroad when he came up with the idea for Muru.

“I was creating these playlists, dragging and dropping, and it took forever,” he said. “[…] So we came up with a very simple system that actually worked on top of my music folder, it was kind of a quick search.”

Johnson founded Muru in February 2014. Muru was only in its conceptual stage when two local angel investors bought in; at launch today it now has raised $500,000 in funding from Angel investors.

In the next few months Johnson’s small locally-based team will roll out features which have been developed especially for the hospitality industry. He’s also expected to announce a subscription-based version for the US. It will be priced at a significantly lower rate than the market standard $9.99 and will pay a significant portion of its revenues to rights holders, but still be able to be profitable.

Muru Music is available now for iOS via the App Store here.