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Elevator Pitch: People's Music Store aims to put the character back into music retail

People's Music Store wants to bring back that indie record store experience to online music, and announced a deal with Universal Music today that doubles the catalogue of the site to include 300,000 tracks from artists including Morrissey, U2, Girls Aloud and Amy Winehouse.

The deal means fans can include Universal catalogue in their own online shopfronts - recommending and promoting the music they love to fans with similar taste.

Founded by music nut and part-time DJ Ged Day, People's Music Store is free for 'shopkeepers' to use and even earns them 10% on sales in the form of vouchers to spend on music. It's also backed by the legendary British label Beggars.

Day explains why music needs to be tied to opinion and recommendation, and why the main priority is to expand the site's catalogue further.

Ged Day, founder of People's Music Store Ged Day, founder of People's Music Store

• Explain your business to my Mum
"Remember when every high street had an independent record store on it, with a person behind the counter who knew everything there was to know about music? Well, we're like an online rebirth of the independent record store - a place where fans can create and run their own music download store for free.

"Music lovers become storekeepers, recommending their favourite music, writing their own reviews and building a community of like-minded fans. Because People's Music Store is entirely powered by music fans, it provides customers looking to buy music with a very natural social discovery experience, full of trusted opinion and authentic reviews - exactly what you'd look for in a bricks and mortar independent record store. And for all sales generated in their store, storekeepers earn a 10% commission in the form of reward points which can be used to buy music in a way which feels like free."

• How do you make money?
"Just like iTunes and other a-la-carte music download services, we license all the music on People's Music Store from record companies or directly from artists and earn revenues from the sale of music downloads."

"We're currently approaching 2,000 users, 1,200 of which have created their own stores. We've just signed Universal Music, the world's largest record label, and the first major label to join People's Music Store - this should significantly increase uptake and guide us towards our target of 25,000 users within 12 months."

• What's your background?
"I've worked in the music industry for over 20 years at record labels, recording studios and music distributors. I also record and occasionally DJ as one half of The Deadbeats. I worked at Warp Records where I founded in 2004 - it was the first site to only sell DRM-free music."

• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"They are intrinsic to the whole ethos of People's Music Store. When starting this site up I really wanted to capture the personal relationships that bond people to music and believe that it's this authentic dialogue running throughout the site that makes spending time here and browsing so interesting. Matching your taste with a human is an excellent filter and much more accurate and meaningful than a computer."

• Name your closest competitors
"Hmmmm, there isn't really anyone doing the exact same thing as us so that's difficult, but any service offering a-la-carte downloads and some aspect of social discovery would count."

• How will you survive the downturn?
"People will dance their way through the recession and we'll be here to cater for all their disco needs."

• What's your biggest challenge?
"Expanding our music catalogue to a comparable size to the market leaders - somewhere in the region of 6m tracks like Amazon, iTunes and 7Digital."

"New services which have recently caught my attention and impressed me include Songkick, whose new private beta version is stunning, SoundCloud, which is just an excellent service for bands and record labels. Also, Jinni is a brilliant site for film recommendations."

• Who's your mentor?
"During my time at Warp Records, Rob Mitchell made a huge impression on me. In the tech space, I've always admired Jeff Bezos."

• How's you work/life balance?
"Much more work than life, but work is very exciting right now so you won't find me complaining!"

• What's the most important piece of software or web tool that you use each day?
"After the obvious candidates like Twitter and Google, I actually think Skype makes a big difference to my life as I often work remotely."

"To become #1 music destination for music fans. A huge digital warehouse of music and opinion tied together."

So what do you think?

• Is the site distinctive enough in the very competitive online music space?

• Would the site do better to focus on one type of music or one audience group?

• Could you see some kind of collaboration with a streaming music service like Spotify?

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