Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne - 2 December 2009

Musbook.com and musicDNA™ are very pleased to announce a collaboration that will lead to the integration of their services and technologies to provide a new eco-system for musicians and music lovers.

Peter Tregear, CEO of Musbook.com said “This collaboration helps us become not just an effective on-line social network for musicians but also a powerful conceptual, educational, and commercial tool. MusBook.com has always been about using the unique power of the web to transform, for the better, the way the music world works. musicDNA offers our site a strikingly original and immensely powerful means towards achieving that end”.

Managing Director of Pensive, Peter Brown said “This is an exciting venture for us and confirms our vision of helping people find their way clearly in increasingly busy digital lives. There is an excellent match in the use of our core technologies in this collaboration, with its emphasis on social objects that are managed under user control and networked through such an important online community”.

Antony Pitts of CTU said “musicDNA is about describing the musical universe in such a way that both people and computers can connect up the information we have - our knowledge about music - with actual musical resources: recordings, sheet music, comment and recommendation - from Joe Bloggs’s blog to the most erudite of scholarly articles. Integrating our model with MusBook’s social networking portal is an important step in making this joined-up vision a reality for music-lovers and musical organizations around the globe”.

The mission of all parties is to empower and enrich the world’s community of musicians by enabling not just professional relationships, but also relationships between musicians and music lovers, to develop in ways that have previously never been possible. They will support these new connections with a comprehensive range of services, tools, and information that will help musicians drive forward the development of musical culture like never before.

The combination of the respective contributions by each of the parties will go a long way to achieving this mission. During this period of collaboration they will integrate the existing Musbook.com web portal with the musicDNA service provided by Pensive / CTU - with its dynamic navigation architecture for mapping the musical domain, using models and processes for managing related musical concepts (such as musical works, performances, recordings, artists, venues, etc.). This integration will open up the possibility of creating a new social community for people around the world to share their musical interests, experiences and knowledge.

For more information, contact support [at] musbook [dot] com

Company History

Musbook.com was founded in 2008 by Australian conductor and academic Peter Tregear and English violinist Simon Hewitt Jones. From offices in Melbourne, London and New York they are creating a new infrastructure for people to discover, create, promote and share music. The MusBook.com website (http://www.musbook.com/) is a web portal, social network and digital publishing website that hosts a global community of musicians and music lovers.

Pensive S.A. (Belgium) provides a range of information management services that offer “GPS for your information” – either figuratively (in the sense of helping users find their way through difficult or unknown “information territory”) or literally - in the case of musicGPS™. Pensive’s unique approach to treating items of information as distinct “social objects” and valued assets, allows users to organize, identify, discover, navigate, annotate and share information more easily and - in contrast to most so-called “Web 2.0” services - always under the user’s control.

CTU is a research and design team whose members have collaborated at the BBC, at Unknown Public, and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The musicDNA project stems from a long-standing research interest in the nature of musical, historical, and aesthetic time, and is about understanding and mapping the essential structure of musical events and resources in order to visualize and navigate this rich semantic space.

For further information:
- about Musbook.com, see www.musbook.com
- about musicDNA™, see www.musicDNA.info
- about Pensive, see www.pensive.eu