A hybrid between Spotify and iTunes, Murfie, a company created by three University of Wisconsin graduates, allows people to build “media ownership in the cloud.”

Now in its fourth year of operation, Murfie offers a service where customers send in their physical CD collections for Murfie to upload it onto the cloud. Customers are then able to play the music through any device they own, Matt Younkle, co-founder of Murfie, said.

Murfie keeps the CD collections in their private storage lockers.

“Fundamentally, what we’re doing is trying to build a future for media ownership in the cloud,” Younkle said.

Customers are also able to sell, buy and trade their CD content with other customers in Murfie’s marketplace, Younkle said. They charge 79 cents per disc to move it to the cloud, as well as receive a commission on the products sold in their marketplace, he said.

It is important for customers to own their investment in music, John Kruse, operations manager for Murfie, said.

“If you go to a music streaming site and pay them for an ad-free experience, you’re sometimes paying $10 a month, and over a course of a year that’s $120 that is no longer liquid,” Kruse said.

Murfie will become more popular in the future as people learn that if they do not buy their music, they are just throwing money away, he added.

Co-founders Younkle, Preston Austin and Steve Faulkner came at the company with different angles, but similar ideas centered around building a future for ownership, Younkle said.

“For me, the spark was unboxing all of my CDs that I had in storage,” Younkle said. “As I was unboxing them it occurred to me that this is sort of strange because I no longer had a CD player, I had no way to play the disks.”

This led to questions about how many other “pieces of plastic” are out there and what the future is for them, Younkle said. Most people don’t realize Americans have invested over $250 billion in their physical music collections, he said.

“Initially, I just didn’t want to see the billions and billions of pieces of plastic end up in landfills and that’s sort of where everything was headed,” Younkle said. “Beyond that there’s a lot of value in our physical music.”

Although college students may not have a large CD collection, the Murfie marketplace offers a selection of various types and genres of music, Younkle said. The quality of music is much higher because it is taken directly from a CD, he said.

Murfie is trying to preserve the value of physical music and “offer a launch pad to the future for it,” Younkle said.

One of the most difficult aspects of keeping Murfie running is explaining its service to customers, Younkle said. Because Murfie is a hybrid between a subscription streaming service, like Spotify, and a music store, like iTunes, many customers do not get the concept, he said.

Younkle said he got started in entrepreneurship by participating in competitions at the College of Engineering when he was a UW student. For example, he invented the Turbo Tap technology used to pour better more efficiently, which is now popular in stadiums across the country. He said he was able to go through the process of bringing “an idea to life.”

“That experience was invaluable and got me hooked on building products and launching products into the real world,” Younkle said.

Correction: This article previously misstated that it cost 70 cents per disc to move it to the cloud, but it actually costs 79 cents per disc. The Badger Herald regrets this mistake.