MURU, inspired by an ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN term glossed as “journey,” is a SYDNEY-based music technology company that transforms metadata, the basic information about every digital music file, and generates extended playlists to fit every taste, every dynamic, by disrupting the way music is classified in the digital realm.
Veteran dancefloor DJ, and MURU founder NICC JOHNSON said, “We’ve built tools that allow streaming and other digital music services to optimize listening experience, streamline data flow, and create new revenue opportunities. MURU aims to add value to the entire industry. Our classification and recommendations help artists, streaming platforms, publishers and, of course, the music fan. We’ve brought big data in harmony with the human response to music,”
MURU playlists, called JOURNEYS, can be generated by selecting genres or artists as beginning and ending points. It can work on top of any streaming service. Users can nudge the playlist to evolve in real time and unfold seamlessly thanks to a proprietary approach to music classification. MURU aims to make machines think more like dedicated DJs, based on Artificial Intelligence, algorithms and human intution.
“We have been working on codifying the DJ part of my brain. If I look at a set of songs, I’ll put them in a certain order I think fits best, dependent on my audience,” JOHNSON said. “Not necessarily slow to uptempo, but juxtaposition. It’s a complex rule set, but one that is translatable to machine learning.
“We’ve created ways to let MUFU do what I used to do as a DJ when I got feedback from the crowd,” he continued. “People have the same reactions intuitively but don’t know how to express them. The things they wanted always came back to the same four questions.
“We’ve really worked to understand how to improve experience, by digging way deeper into the digital catalog and social data, by generating rules that reflect people’s response to music, and by creating something people can use easily to hear music that they love. And even with the same genres to start and finish, you’ll never get the same playlist twice.”