The Filter's mission: Refine music, video and movie tastes

— -- Peter Gabriel's latest venture isn't a new album but a better way to serve up music and other entertainment on the Internet.

The Filter (thefilter.com) is the latest entry in a growing lineup of online recommendation engines that suggest new music based on your current favorites.

Unlike sites such as music's Pandora.com and film's Flixster.com, The Filter "is trying to expand," going beyond music and movies into TV and videos, Gabriel says.

Multimedia has been a strength for Gabriel, who has incorporated theatrics into concerts as the original lead singer for Genesis and as a Grammy-winning solo artist. His early CD-ROMs Xplora and Eve pushed the interactive envelope in the '90s.

While working with On Demand Distribution (OD2), an online music distributor he co-founded in 2000, Gabriel became intrigued with the idea of a software program that could sift through the totality of music and recommend new songs.

He registered thefilter.com Web address and later joined recommendation technology firm Exabre and some former OD2 engineers in the new venture.

"This vision was that we are all filters in one way or another," Gabriel says. "We have our experiences and our tastes. And we're trying to find some smart ways of taking advantage of that so that you can mix not only your own taste, (but also) your friends and musicians, artists, filmmakers, critics, magazines or (other) taste-making influences. You should be able to access them and hit a do-it button and get some stuff that you wouldn't otherwise."

An all-in-one recommendation project makes sense, says Paul Resnikoff, editor of DigitalMusicNews.com.

And Gabriel's involvement "just brings it above the level of other start-ups," he says. "He's a cutting-edge digital entrepreneur. It's good energy."

At its simplest, The Filter uses proprietary artificial intelligence to suggest works that are similar to ones already identified as favorites, using a database of more than 4.5 million songs and 330,000 movies. The database will account for users' changing tastes and grow as more users join during the private beta-testing period, beginning today (request access at thefilter.com).