Mining music connections from the web to offer fans a new set of features
START-UP NATION: Seevl:Having launched Seevl in January this year, it is now all systems go after a recent tweak and relaunch
IF INTERNET-based music search and discovery start-up Seevl could realise its dream of signing a deal with YouTube over the next few months, the Galway-based company would be singing all the way to the bank.
Seevl is the creation of Dr Alexandre Passant who moved to Ireland from France four years ago to work at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway.
Passant, whose background is in developing Semantic Web technologies to connect social enterprise data, is an avid music buff and a frequent visitor to YouTube in search of new bands.
What drove him nuts was having to flick back and forth between different sites to find new artists and to get biographical and background information about the music and the musicians he was listening to. He felt there had to be a better way to integrate the whole music discovery experience and set about making it happen.
The result is a music search and discovery service that he says is head and shoulders above the other search services currently on the market because it lets people find everything they want to know about music within YouTube.
“Basically we are better at digging out more detailed and less obvious connections between artists than other search services,” Passant adds.
“This means we can offer users suggestions about new music options that would not necessarily spring immediately to mind. For example, suggesting that people listen to the bands that influenced the bands they are listening to or telling them about other bands who recorded on the same niche record label.
“The estimated volume of committed music fans regularly going on YouTube to listen to music is more than 30 million,” he says, “but from personal experience and from interviewing music lovers and surveying this segment, I know how frustrating it is to have so little context around it.
“You want to know who’s that band? Who are its members? When did they start to play together? Seevl provides an integrated view combining biographies, fact-sheets and recommendations together with advanced search and playlisting features, all within YouTube.”
Passant says Seevl is designed to recreate online the sort of music discovery experience people used to have when browsing record sleeves. “We do this by bringing together data from many sources and building consolidated artist profiles so we can then enable our smart search and recommendations features.
