Goombah: Community Driven Music Discovery Launches Today

Goombah: Community Driven Music Discovery Launches Today

Analyzes iTunes(TM) Libraries to Recommend Tracks from Matching Members

Goombah's Taste-Targeted Free Music Creates Efficient Promotional Model

BRUNSWICK, Maine, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Introduced today, Goombah is a free desktop application for music recommendations based on each user's taste and the power of community. Using its patent pending technology, Goombah analyzes each user's iTunes collection and listening behavior and connects them to people and music that precisely match their taste. Users can sample recommendations and purchase them from various online sources, download free, legal MP3s, and browse entire music libraries of matching members and friends.

During its five-month beta testing period, Goombah's user-driven music inventory has grown to nearly 5 million unique tracks from which it draws recommendations.

Goombah, whose name means close friend or trusted advisor, uses "matching member" libraries to generate virtual consensus on recommendations with no effort required from users to define their taste or search for others. Recommendations are limited only by the array of music in Goombah members' collections, and are not influenced by what is marketed or narrowed by a pre-selection of tracks or artists. As a result, music recommendations continually change as the community grows and are not only precise, but diverse and full of pleasant surprises.

If users want to take the wheel in exploring new music, members' and friends' libraries are available in their entirety for browsing. Users can control the range of Goombah's recommendations with an "Adventurous" slider, changing from popular recommendations to fringe artists with a click. Personalized recommendations, matching members and free music can be easily generated by iTunes playlist, genre, artist or any combination of tracks.

"As consumers' music libraries transition from physical CDs to virtual files, and the sheer number of 'tastemakers' increases, finding reliable sources of recommendations for new music -- that map to his or her personal tastes -- is becoming more difficult," said Mike McGuire, research VP, Gartner. "Consumers are looking for tools which can help manage a more complex environment while giving them ways to link with like-minded music fans."

Goombah offers a wide variety of free, legal MP3s from established and emerging artists that are targeted to users based on their taste. Users can download these tracks to play on their iPod or other music player and keep them forever. This promotional music is sourced from record labels and third-party distributors, vetted for quality, and updated weekly on "Free Music Fridays."

"Goombah provides a compelling way for consumers to discover music and build their personal collections. We also offer a way for artists to efficiently find their audience regardless of how large or small it may be," said Diane Sammer, CEO of Emergent Music, LLC, the company that developed Goombah.

"Goombah's distributed approach and matching technology makes it the workhorse of recommendation services, resulting in quality taste-based matches for all users. Goombah finds the best tastemakers for each user and music spreads through the community organically like word-of-mouth between friends," explained Sammer.

Goombah's Technology

Goombah's sustainable advantage is the combination of its pending patents for statistical algorithms and massively-distributed architecture. This technology delivers on the promise of collaborative filtering for music by distributing the large computational load to the users' underutilized desktop. Users get immediate quality recommendations and the processing capacity grows with the community, minimizing the company's investment in infrastructure.

The company's core technology enables the processing of very large data sets associated with music recommendations. All of the music tracks in every user's library are considered by Goombah when evaluating a taste profile. The ability to analyze all of the information, with no need to reduce it into a summary form, allows for the precise matching of dynamic taste profiles, yielding high quality and varied recommendations.

In addition to precision, the Goombah technology is completely scalable regardless of the number of users or the size of their libraries. The inventory is unbiased and there is no limit to the amount and types of music that can be recommended. Also, the core recommendation technology is capable of application to other forms of digital content.

New Promotional Model: Target Audience Positioning (TAP(TM))

Goombah's precise matching technology creates an efficient promotional model for the music industry to reach their audience niche. The TAP program allows artists to access, through Goombah, individuals who are likely to enjoy their music based on their taste. Already, more than 30 labels and distributors, including Adrenaline Music, Iris Distribution, Touch and Go/Quarterstick Records and Indie 911 have signed on with Goombah to promote their artists.

"Toolshed has been promoting music on behalf of its label and artist clients through Goombah since its early beta testing, and we're very excited about what we've seen so far. It's our feeling that music recommendations based on analysis of what is in a particular user's iTunes library is very much the wave of the future. Our artists are finding new fans every day through Goombah," said Dick Huey, CEO of Toolshed and new media consultant.

About Emergent Music

Emergent Music, LLC is based in Brunswick, Maine, where five experienced entrepreneurs banded together around the idea that nothing should come between artist and audience. To download Goombah, and for more information on Goombah and Emergent Music LLC visit http://www.goombah.com/.

iTunes and iPod are trademarks of Apple Computer.

Source: Emergent Music, LLC

CONTACT: Cheryl Delgreco of Media Strategies, Inc. for Emergent Music,
LLC, cdelgreco@msipr.com

Web site: http://www.goombah.com/

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