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title: WWDC2004 Session 706
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-706
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# WWDC2004 Session 706

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en hello good morning everybody I'm Glen Bullock I work on the QuickTime product marketing team you are in 706 QuickTime in the music industry it's pretty clear I guess is stating the obvious that there's been quite a bit of change in the music industry in the last several years and arguably a huge amount of it has been driven by technology and by the internet a good deal of it bad a good deal of it good for the music industry we're here today to focus on some of the really good things that have been going on and we're very privileged to have our two speakers today dick Huey comes to us from New York where he's been working with independent labels delivering a huge amount of infrastructure and marketing for dozens and dozens of labels and providing new media access and exposure for lots and lots of independent bands our second speaker Ken Wagner comes to us from an incredible history over the last several years in new media and before that in the music industry and we're really privileged to have him give us an update on the wilcos story which is very famous and happy to say the number one album on iTunes right now there's a lot of things we'll cover here and you know certainly these folks are available later on for questions we'll hold questions till the end and then they'll be floating in and out of the QuickTime lab so they're accessible there's a number of other sessions I just wanted to highlight very quickly after lunch in haight-ashbury there's a session 7:34 on h.264 and it's a really really important session it's a pretty important technology that we're going to be adding in the typical time and lastly at 7:30 tonight the Design Awards where some of the world's best QuickTime content will be featured is pretty exciting event tonight so don't miss that so that further ado I will pass it along to dick Huey and we'll have him speak and then I'll come back up and introduce Ken and then after that we can have some questions thanks [Applause] good morning the designs can come from your mouth as great so toolshed is an online marketing company we we provide a number of services to primarily an independent label and artist clientele we do online promotion we also do a great deal of digital licensing on the digital licensing side its licensing audio and video on behalf of our label and artist clients to a wide variety of digital music services such as iTunes on the promotion side is audio and video promotion to media websites Merrick online launch Apple in some cases real and smaller sites as well we also do or help coordinate webcasts we work with developers to do those we do pre-release album streams and sort of provide a new media department for hire new media being the part of a record company that refers to online piece so toolshed was born out of the idea that independent music is too good to be relegated to the backseat with respect to to the overall mix of music that's available on the net and it was also born out of a conviction that technology is only good and useful within the sphere if it's wielded directly sometimes it can get in the way we try not to let that happen I started to shed in 2001 this was after four years as head of new media for The Beggar's group and Matador Records these are two seminal record labels seminal independent record labels hey that works look at that who are responsible for really shaping the independent music sphere in the 80s and the 90s bands like Bauhaus prodigy badly drawn boy pavement cat power these are household names in the independent music world and labels such as 4ad Beggars Banquet to pure XL Recordings are all part of this group when I started the new media Department of beggar's it was under the presumption that the promotional landscape would be pretty much dictated to me and I would slap myself into it as best as I could now seven years down the road I take a different approach which is that if there's something that I don't like I go out and actively try to change it and technology is helping me do that in helping toolshed do that which is where some of you who are developers come into the picture the independent music industry is an industry that's full of good intentions it doesn't have the baggage frequently associated with the major label corporately dictated new media departments it does have way too few staff staff who frequently don't have expertise in the area of online marketing it has plenty of good ideas and and too little affordable technology available to it so there I am throwing down the gauntlet this is the niche that I place tool shed into and among our clients besides the beggars group and matter no records we work with touch and go records this is the label that brought you or Jovic ill and more recently TV on the radio and Chik Chik Chik righteous Bay Records on a defranco's label we work with key rockstars most recently on the sleater-kinney record of about a year and a half ago and the Decembrists and spin art and a variety of others we also work directly with artists Kristyn Hirsch dan Zanes Aimee Mann are all clients of toolshed so our vision is to marry contacts and technology with aggregated independent music content let me give you some examples of how we do that the toolshed brand itself we've been able to make synonymous with great independent music and that gives us access on behalf of our independent label and and harness clients our challenge is to take technology and make that a great partnership allow these little labels who don't have resources to do things they wouldn't be able to do otherwise to give them access they wouldn't be able to have otherwise the Internet is a great equalizer for independent labels unfortunately the the mainstream methods of distribution for media whether they be physical record distribution or radio are almost completely controlled by the major labels access to huge amounts of money among other things and or direct control through ownership we want to take major label technology and make it available to independence let me show you an example of how we're doing this this is this is off the tool shed website it's an example of our media tool kit for every project that we work we build we build a media page and if you were to click through on any of the project links that you see there you'd come up with a page that would show you all the assets that you would need if you were a project manager or a Content decision-maker at at one of the sites I mentioned earlier to put up a promotion one of the main reasons independent artists and labels don't get promotion is that they are frequently unorganized about this process it's hard to get in touch with them so we put it all in one place and we also provide them with with information we we have something built into this this is by the way just a PHP front end on a MySQL database there's nothing complicated or particularly difficult about it we keep track of 1 2 or dates are happening and we use those to actively market to the content providers so that they know when the band is going to be in their area and then we give them links for for audio and video one of the reasons we're really by the way this the same kind of system is utilized by most of the major labels and as a media toolkit and and there's our effective ours are I think even maybe a little more effective because we we bring bandwidth into the picture as a as a company we we purchase bandwidth and bulk and we redistribute it through a variety of bandwidth sharing and what's the term that I'm looking for load sharing schemes so that individual record labels or small record labels can have access to good bandwidth and then we take that in the form of audio and video and we give it to editorially important websites sites that otherwise probably wouldn't post audio or video because for one reason or another they don't they don't have a good bandwidth the only place and would be too expensive for them so that's been tremendously successful for us it's something we've rolled out over the last six months and we're continuing to roll it out now the other thing that's exciting about that is the ability for us to provide reporting reporting is one of the areas where we've never really as independent labels or artists had very good access to what happens with the music once it goes out there you might know that a particular website gets 500,000 hits a month you might know that your particular download was downloaded a thousand times you might know that or you might not but the kinds of things that we're starting to be able to tell people are and I'll give you a concrete example of this in a minute we can look and see everybody that's linking to the files that we put up many of them not people that we've gotten in touch with and we're news groups for instance we get this all the time people grabbing our track and putting them up on news groups so we google them and we Google the IP and then we include that in our report to the record label so they can see what's happening virally with their with their music we're also able to and this is the concrete example I want to give you work with companies to determine whether the kind of music we put on a particular website was of interest and the way we do that is by looking at how long the average download time was if we put up a three point six megabyte file we did this recently with one of our content providers have a combien Fitch and the average download time is 1.6 megabytes which it was in that particular case then most of the people who are or majority of people who are listening to this are only downloading about 30 or 40 seconds to the song and then clicking away this is the kind of useful information that helps us gauge where we should be putting music and what we're actively working for ways that we can increase the kind of information that we give to people and we're actively looking for ideas and working with developers who can who can develop products for us that provide us with that kind of information let me every time I step over here it gets a lot louder because of that got it ok let's see I wanted I want to now look specifically a quick time we work extensively with Apple and with the promotion department at Apple of which plan bullish is a key part and I want to show you how QuickTime is helping us level the playing field for independence and I'm going to go over here we see there's a QuickTime newsletter schedule that's published online by Apple we utilize that and push for promotional album streams which appear on thank you this website we have we have a placement up here right now Julie and Coryell is one of ours and the if you were to click on any one of these you would be taken off to the to the website I'll give you an example let's see what an eye should I pick the Wilko one as an example better let's see here I'm not going to use this one I'll use a different one let's see let's see what this one is okay so this one's going to Rhino and obviously Rhino is able to control the interface and and and what's presented if if they chose to do so they would be able to put links to the iTunes Music Store on here so that if somebody was listening to a full album stream on this page they could they could click to and purchase the tracks and you can make it as beautiful as you want plus you get all the traffic so this is a really exciting thing for independent labels they're different and artists have been very excited to see what we've been able to do with this [Music] we're if you could switch back to the other slide down does it go back to the other one to the slides that I was looking at earlier there we go Thanks we this this tool could be better we need a very simple way to add drawers to this for things like quick time if we were able to circo's if we were able to put all the assets that are needed for that quick time promotion that you saw in one place in a separate little area and maybe even interface it directly with Apple's FileMaker Pro database that they use that would be a great useful thing for us that would cut out many emails and and streamline the process so I'm trying to throw out ideas for for people and encourage you to to look at these kinds of things and see where where you might come into the picture we don't want to be a developer we support the Mac platform and we want to utilize it with by utilizing tools or we want to support it by utilizing tools that are developed for it that we can take to independent record labels I'd like to show you now so here where's my little thing and that's fine actually you can leave that there we have a project that's about four years old at this point it's a QuickTime radio station called ad decks you remember from school the a/v audio-visual decks that used to come in with the slide projector on it or that was a film projector that's what it was named after it's it's actually right here and AV deck is was initially just a quicktime radio station it is developed now in its third iteration which I'm going to show you right now into a very integrated commerce and promotional platform and I'd like to I'd like to thank developer partners liquid rock studio Michael chefs here today for coming up with its alpha build which you'll forgive us if it doesn't work completely correctly but I think it probably will and also back born that backbone networks who handles the radio piece of this this puzzle so here we go [Music] probably turn it down a little bit maybe live to do that there we go okay this is um this is actually this player will actually interface with a database that beggars group maintains which contains all of its metadata everything from the actual song files themselves for every piece of music that the beggars group has ever put out to all the associated metadata the song names track links the release information etc it's going to be it's going to interface with all of that via the backbone network software and will be able to use this to create playlists on the fly which we're really excited about so the idea behind this was if you're listening to something and you like it why not be able to buy it so we'll click on the playlist button we get this which populates with with the existing playlist and from here we can do a number of things if we select something we could actually let's pick this let's try the preview button it's pretty it's a PV button connected it is okay all right double click maybe or maybe not let's try this one instead some of some of this is hooked up in Sun isn't there we go okay and there we go for that particular release right through to the iTunes music store we're really really excited about this the other thing that you'll be able to do from here is you'll be able to you'll be able to buy the CD and this will integrate on the back end with the beggars group mail order system and and if and many of these tracks will have video and clicking on this pops up our video player this isn't our video but it was a video that we had access to so and we've tried to incorporate some nice touches like in terms of playing the stream fade out when it when the radio is playing and you switch over to video and vice versa so that's that's what we have for AV deck we're really excited about it it's going to launch we hope in a couple weeks and future iteration of this we hope will include streaming subscription-based video where we'd be able to develop content for this give access to the artist in ways that we haven't really contemplated yet and and charge a monthly subscription fee so we have free content and we'd have paid for play content it would give increased access of some kind that actually just about wraps it up for me the only the two areas that I just wanted to talk real briefly about our what I would consider to be opportunities and maybe challenges to developers in the audience the first one is I guess I'd loosely title it DRM versus crop cross-platform compatibility there's I'm sure everybody's aware there are a wide variety of format Wars that are that are on at the moment between for instance Windows Media and NAAC this creates problems and opportunities Windows Media 7.3 supported WMA with DRM version 1 when does media 9 doesn't this is a problem for somebody on the promotional side of things because anytime a client wants a secure download that for instance collects emails as part of the license procurement process we have to use Windows Media which cuts out our Mac users so I'm throwing that out there to powers-that-be that that's a that's a problem for us that I would certainly love to see addressed by whoever feels capable of addressing it and and on the iTunes and we're we're keen to get the ability to determine what music we've submitted to to iTunes and what stage it is in terms of in terms of placement into the card I think any record label I've talked to is interested in that kind of thing there there are probably a hundred other areas that I'd love to talk to you individually about and I will I'll be around afterwards I'm going to turn it over now to Ken Wagner and thanks very much for your time I appreciate it thanks dick so you know it seems like there's a good start here you know there's a whole sort of big leveling effect happening for independent artists and we're seeing not only companies like toolshed and others provide new media marketing for independent labels plenty of websites that are available out there that are strong or specific so it's not all about Clear Channel and radio and MTV anymore so there's a lot of opportunities and we're seeing that sort of really start to blossom and grow with that there's sort of a whole bunch of new challenges and things that we need to address and clearly the sort of movement by lots and lots of companies towards standards and choice and differentiation in a competitive marketplace based on standards allows a lot of folks to you know use different tools and choose tools that are based on these standards and apply them interoperable out there if you're interested in internet radio and specifically the product backbone networks has created and it is tremendous it's a complete internet radio to set up in a box with all the reporting that's necessary for in really generating a complete and robust internet radio in a box solution that session is 725 it's 2 o'clock on Friday in haight-ashbury so our next speaker Ken Wagner I've known for quite a while and you know as far as success stories go and some probably some of the most interesting anecdotes and and and performance on what's happened the beginning of the sort of peer-to-peer decline of major labels the effect that had on the non a list bands or whatever and some of the initiative and some of the tools that bands like Wilco and through Ken Wagner taken have Clinton kind of dispelled a lot of the myths about you know what the web can or doesn't do for bands and and how it works so I won't steal in EM Ken's Thunder I'll introduce him and here you go I am ok my name is Ken Wagner as a company called smartly done solutions and I started smartly done in 1999 as I was putting my record company out of business and then have set out to try to put every other record company out of business in the process I'm just kind of kidding but anyhow I had an independent label from 1994 to 1999 called hit recordings put out 25 records with varying success and through the whole process tried to take advantage of as much internet opportunity as there was out there because coming from an independent label background have been in the independent record business by entire life 20 years I was always faced with the wall of available opportunity because of the limits of just resources really trying to get on the radio trying to get on TV trying to get in the press everything like that and I just really saw the internet as an opportunity to reach an audience and especially a a direct audience if somebody was interested in my band or in my label they could come directly to me and I could give them the content instead of spending all my money all my resources trying to get it out there and hoping that someone would hear it hoping someone would not resell at a record store whatever and so with what I really started smartly done to do was to really help bands and help independent record companies and independent businesses reach their audience more effectively by the web and one of my first clients ironically ended up being this band Wilco which I'm not sure if all of you are familiar with but they're a band from Chicago who had at the time three records out on reprise records and grew out of the band Uncle Tupelo and around the time that I started working with them they had their third record out on reprieves and were had just delivered a live record to Warner Brothers that Warner Brothers had said that they didn't think it was the right time for the band to release a live record so I started working with the band to try to help them find a way to put the record out online this was back in the boom of 99 2000 so there were great opportunities out there but then as the AOL Time Warner merger happened moratorium got put on anything so we ended up having to shell the live record and then right after that all kind of went down we started to shift focus to setting up the band's new record which was this album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and I'll kind of go through the story and talk to you about the process of that record and then leading up to the new record which just came out last Tuesday so this is kind of some information I've kind of given you some background on myself in the band basically when I went to work with with the band at the time the record had been out for their album summer Keith had been out for about a year and a half when I first started talking to them and what ends up happening really when you're the mercy of the new media Department of a major record company is kind of the same thing as being dealing with any other department at a major record company which is you have about a maybe 90 day window where they're really going to pay attention to you and then they just do to just limited resources have to move on to other things so what we really set out to do with the Wilko site and the whole will go online plan was to really make will go a priority every day on their own site so in doing that initially we ran into starting to set up the record and set up the site in anticipation of this new record coming out that was scheduled to come out in the summer of 2001 and basically most of what I submitted as a marketing plan got rejected due to corporate policies we weren't allowed to stream more than 30 seconds it wasn't allowed to be higher than 32 kilobits per second and we wanted to offer the full album to people and they said no way then the band delivered the record to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers rejected the record and said that it was I believed the exact term was commercial suicide for the band released the record and they asked the band to change the record and around the same time the record leaked onto peer-to-peer networks and started being randomly traded and the band were kind of in this limbo because they were at a disagreement with the record company and we really couldn't do anything about it until the issues got resolved ultimately the band and represented of parting ways and pretty much the day the band got the rights to the record back we put a stream of the entire record online and in the first day we did 18,000 visits to the website and did 15 gigabytes of transfer on my 29.95 son a month hosting plan $12 per additional gigabyte so I was kind of figuring my hosting bill was probably going to be around $4,000 for the month so I emailed Jimmy Dixon at Apple who I'd known for money worked at Warner Brothers and Jimmy was kind enough to introduce me to Glen who Glen called me up and said don't worry about it I've already been in touch with Warner Brothers we're fully and interested we're going to help on the record that was like but we're not out Warner Brothers anymore and Glen was like how did that happen and I explained him and he offered to help so we left the stream of the record up to so we launched the stream of the record on September 18th a week after September 11th I have to mention the thing because it seems like everyone eyes does but we launched the stream on the 18th of September and the band who just gone through this traumatic thing of losing the record deal and not really knowing what was going to happen next and we started to try to plan the band had a tour plan that was originally supposed to be in support of the record that was supposed to start on the 20th of September and after the whole September 11 thing and everything we sat down had a meeting and the band were like yeah we still want to go on the road so we put the record online the band went on the road and they did 30 dates around the country sold out every show played nine of the 11 songs off the new record to the audience and everybody in the audience at every show knew every song from the streams and from the p2p a record being out there ultimately it took a while for us to get to Misha resolved and find a new label the band ended up signing with Nonesuch Records which ironically is another part of Warner Brothers got paid again for the record that Warner Brothers had given us back and then the record ended up coming out in April of 2002 and debuted at number 13 and sold 56,000 copies in the first week after we'd given the record away online for about eight months kind of disproved the whole concept of oh no the records on the Internet we better rush the release date so anyhow these are some of the things that I kind of set out to do with Wilco and that you can really do an offer to any band all quick time enabled and really that's kind of what I try to do with all of my clients is I only work in QuickTime I managed a company that was a part content partner with real for about a year back in 2000 and I was desperately trying to shift them to quick time and ever since I started my own company really all I've ever worked in this quick time any time I encounter a new media department or a manager or anybody that's got concerns about the other formats I just explained to them that for the experience the ease of use and the deliverability there's just no comparison the ease of implementation and just the whole quality I just don't feel that there's any any comparison and that's really why I really choose to just work in quick time also the fact that I'm not necessarily a super technical guy I come from a record industry background management record promotion and concert production and record production but not from a real technical experience I started using Macs in 87 but was primarily used it to facilitate my my business as a FileMaker guy and just general you know computing applications and graphics but not super super technical but I found that starting in 95 96 the ease of use for QuickTime is what made it really easy for me to do it and really is what kind of made me become a web developer and I use that term loosely because I don't super consider myself to be a web developer but what we've done with the Wilko record again is from the audio previews of the record at the same time that the band was making in the process of making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot they worked with a director named Sam Jones who's a photographer she's for Vanity Fair in a pretty famous photographer and Sam shouted documentary of the entire process and as Jeff Tweedy from the band said the less lucky we got the more lucky he got because the whole drama of the story played out with the record company and everything and that ultimately is what made the made the film really interesting and we worked with Sam to offer the trailer of the movie and dailies of the film and some snippets a really help build anticipation at the same time that the death the interest in the record was building Sam was getting ready to put out the film another area that we've really worked on which was really fueled by my attending QuickTime live in 2002 was with QuickTime broadcaster I've always kind of considered the Internet to really be a free broadcast license and the free printing press if you will and it's completely enabling and gives you the as much reach as you are capable of taking advantage of and using QuickTime broadcaster we started webcasting shows in the fall of 2002 and we've done about a half a dozen webcasts from various locations Chicago Washington DC Missoula Montana Toronto Canada just kind of wherever we can get bandwidth and it kind of makes sense logistically we'll we'll do live webcasts and I'll show you some of those in a minute that led into more conversations with Glenn more things to do we've made the last two records enhanced CDs and we've done some pretty neat stuff I think with the enhanced content on both records and I'll show you some of that stuff as well and then what we really set out to do with the enhanced content again was because of the fact that the wiki Hotel Foxtrot had been online for so long we are really looking to do something to make it worth people's while to buy the record the band have a very loyal fan base but we really felt that we were kind of fighting an uphill battle to some extent just because of the fact that the record had so saturated the market having been out there for eight months and then the additional thing that we've just really started to explore some iTunes integration and we we've got some other things that we're kind of working on an approximate out bad so I kind of jumped ahead of myself with my timeline so I think I'm just going to switch to the computer and just kind of show some stuff because it's more interesting than listening to me talk I think so if you can go to a computer 3 here first thing is we're prominently featured and I would chuck that our success in the iTunes Music Store is Glenn said written number one record in iTunes right now records been out for a week and again as Dick was saying being featured on me being featured on the that was Dexys Midnight Runners I believe being featured on the quick hindsight has proven to be a massive promotional of massive promotional value to us both in the Quicktime newsletter that goes out every other week on Fridays and on the site it just drives massive track it the traffic to our site says crafts our server a couple times and it again goes directly to the destination if it works and what we did here is again we ended up with the dilemma but sort of we kind of figured it was going to happen it was inevitable the record leaked onto the network under the p2p in the end of March beginning of April the record was originally slated to come out in June and we had already built the based on the success of the first record we had already planned on doing the preview of the second record but as soon as it leaked on p2p the our grandiose plan of building a player got bum-rushed into three days work which I couldn't have done again without the help of Michael Schaff over there so this is just a that's not it that's later this is a full album preview which is launching multiple times because I keep clicking up this now so a easier if you look down at the screen [Music] so this is a we did three rates on this we get a fifty six a hundred kilobit and a three hundred kilobits stream to give people the full stereo experience and again that can we allowed people to kind of track through the record song by song and really preview the record and satisfy their curiosity I personally don't believe that there's anything to fear about letting people hear your music online and I think that the I've been befuddled by the record company's approach for the last ten years that they've fought this opportunity when they spend millions of dollars on radio promotion and hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos to try to get their music heard by people and then they have this golden opportunity to put their music in front of people and they constantly fight it and you have this thing where you've got this new media department at one end of the hall spending thousands of dollars trying to get the records played and you've got the lawyers at the other end of Hall spending millions of dollars to stop people from hearing them and it just seems to not be a really good business model and I think I could probably answer why they're having some problems but uh anyhow so this is the the skin player that we did for the record and it's a it's been up since April beginning of April leading up to the record coming out last week I don't have all the numbers on the record right now both they're estimating that were going to do somewhere between eighty and ninety thousand copies first week out and definitely going to debut top ten with the record I'd say thank you but it had nothing to do with me so but I'll thank you on behalf of the band so that's that's the player from the society we kind of do the same thing where we just really make it available to people again you know I grew up in there where my whole awareness of bands came from finding out about bands and reading the papers and reading magazines and finding out about fans and going to the record store dropping $20 or $30 on every import record and it's really doing it and again just from the opportunity if I would here where it's like you've got somebody's curiosity and they come I think the thing that makes the most sense is to make it as easy as possible for them to hear your music and I really have found quick time to just really deliver on that so that's again why why we use it and why I think we've had so much success so some of the things that we did with the with the will cuffs as I was talking about the movie before there was this the movie of we and we included the trailer in the enhanced CD content for the for the first will go yank a Hotel Foxtrot but as we were finishing the enhanced content excuse me the trailer wasn't ready for the movie yet so we did include some content we had a four or five minute clip of the band playing a song live that we included on the CD itself but then we brought people off the site to the trailer for the film and this way we were kind of able to like update the content maintain the content and I had grander ambitions but I also had three days to develop the enhanced content for the CD so I didn't really make everything that I wanted to happen on this record but again just the ability the the ease of of embedding the video in the website and everything just was a no-brainer and so it was it was very easy to do and very effective the movie ended up doing really well both on DVD and in the theaters and and was was quite successful now the other thing that I was talking about having done with these guys is that we've been doing a lot of of live webcast and originally when I first started doing them we were just doing a really basic embedding the player and a page promoting it off the site and just trying to get people to come and we you know we did a couple of them really just to kind of test the waters I think we may have been one of the probably the first band to really do a webcast using broadcaster and Southglenn I think yeah so we just really jumped on it first again like I worked with this company and we had done 1,500 live shows and live DJ sets all available online and a lot of them we had done live content and I was really enamored with that whole process and once I saw a QuickTime broadcaster I was just like I mean so since then we've worked since I guess the first thing we did with September of 2002 and we've just kind of continued to refine that process and after we've done a couple of Wilco ones Wilco went on tour with REM last fall and we kind of pitched REM about doing some webcasts from their tour and they they were into the idea and we ended up getting to work with Warner Brothers and working with REM to do this player for REM glass tour and what we did is we kind of pitched him on really building it as a promotional device they had this Greatest Hits record coming out and they had this greatest hits tour that they were doing where they were they the band don't really go out and play there I'm going to just pause it for a second the band don't really go out and play their play their hits all the time and they've got this vast library of of hits that they've built over a 20-year career and as they were going to go out and do this tour we kind of pitched him on the idea of doing a player that was basically the ref movie is only 144 K complete or is a smaller Michael I saw you shake your head so the concept being that this is a completely viral viral item that was able to be provided to radio stations and to be popped up the Warner Brothers site popped up the REM site and all of the content we were able to update dynamically and it's essentially an email Abul web site really if you look at it what they wanted to do was they wanted to not only promote themselves but they wanted to promote the other bands that were on the tour they over the four legs of the tour they took four different bands and what we did is we built in bio information for each of the bands that were on the tour and then in addition we built this little jukebox which is going to show four oh four because we killed the content but what this was was just a sampler of all the bands on the tour and again this was up the plan when we originally did the pitch again was 90 days out and we got a green light 8 days before the first show so but the plan was to offer fans an opportunity to hear not only REM and some of songs from the greatest forthcoming greatest hits album but also like it show people of other bands at around the tour I believe the dates yeah this was the whole tour here and again we pitched him originally we're going to build ticketing and everything into it but just do the development time we didn't have the opportunity but again you kind of see how the whole thing is really a website basically that was able to kind of be put out there then what we did was this was the first time that we having worked with streaming video and webcasting video despite the fact that I had a ps3 in Missoula and I could have done full-frame video I didn't have a source source content so what on the previous tour REM had carried a three camera crew and we're doing video on Jumbotrons and everything like that so the original pitch was to do video content but since there was no video content we came up with the ideas doing live images and shooting photos during the show to kind of give people a visual experience with no video and we Michael helped us build this player which when we first told the QuickTime guys that we wanted to do it they were like you want to what and but we ultimately ended up pulling it off and I might ask Michael to step up here for a second and tell me how we did it since I have no idea but anyhow what we did is the live element is a the full two hour show streamed live we did two shows from the tour we did mozilla mountain and we did Toronto Canada and it's a full the full recording and the band's gave us unlimited access we're able to normally when you're shooting a big band to limit you to computing three three songs because after that they get all sweaty and they don't want anyone to see them but they gave us unlimited access we're able to go anywhere on the stage and we shot the entire time and we were dumped in the dump in the picture basically aa3 PowerBook setup we had one power book onstage at the monitor position and to power books in front of house one doing audio and one doing images and we did a resume of shooting the images digitally dumping them into iPhoto selecting them really quick batching them and then I was putting them from front from the stage back to my partner in front of house who was in turn putting them onto the server and updating the script all the images are all served from an XML file so we're able to update the script on-the-fly and add new photos so as you're watching the show occur and there's a times elapsing the photos are constantly fresh and kind of keep you keep you in the loop the ability to control the transitions how long the photos display how long we did the transitions take and all the transition if you know if it's a wipe or fade or anything like that so this this worked pretty well and then what we did is we did the live event and then in turn just turned it around right away edited the photos and put the live stream up on demand and the band used at Warner's used it to really kind of like let people hear the band and let people like see what the tour was like so that's the REM player from there we we crossed over into the with the Wilco tour well actually not even with the tour but with this new record again due to development time which always seems to be the trouble here and I it's like I always put these things out there so far in advance I put this pitch out there in February and basically got the green light on June 7th for a record that was coming out June 22nd so we had 15 days to really kind of pull the whole thing together and I came up with a brilliant idea that uh well the band change the band change members the band added two new members right before the writers the rep this they finished recording this record and what we really wanted to do was to kind of satisfy people's curiosity that the new lineup was going to be up to snuff and let people hear it and then also again because of the record that had done on p2p we're looking for a way to add value and so what we did is we allowed ourselves the ability to update the content so on the actual disk itself is only a ref movie that comes to the server and gets whatever content that we give them so by doing that we were able to record the band's show in their hometown Chicago on the June 12th and have the archive of the show and photos all built into a player and available to anyone that bought the record so in essence buying the new studio album you basically get a free live record that goes with it and as the band are just in the process they're in learn Europe right now touring will be back in the States touring all for the next year or so starting in the fall and what we really wanted to do was kind of satisfy people's curiosity so we built this player that well here we go this is sort of a image of the disc this is the front end that you get from the from the disc and it just tells you that you need QuickTime and then it tells you to click through to get the content once you click through we've built in this really nifty little thing that kind of comes back and looks to verify that the person's got the CD in their computer and then gives them that gives them the enhanced content if they don't if the if they move the movie off of the disc and they try to do it it will look back it won't see the file on the disc and it won't give them the enhanced content will basically lock them out now we did have one minor problem which is a good one to watch out for but the plant actually took the liberties of adding a space to the end of our directory so on Tuesday morning after the midnight sale the record went on sale and I woke up to 71 emails from people saying your content says that I need to have the CD in my drive and the CDs in my drive and it's telling me I don't have the CD and so the other thing was was that Michel neither Michael or I had received a copy of the actual CD for testing due to our limited development time but within within a an hour so we were able to figure out Michael was able to figure out the issue was that they added the space and we were again able to fix the content on the server side and solve the issue so from there the person clicks through and they're they're given this player here which kind of welcomes the fan give them a message and then it streams a full two hour and seven minute long performance by the band again recorded in Chicago with the live photographs added and since we didn't do this one live we had the luxury of kind of doing we had a guy named Zoran Orlick who's a Chicago based photographer shoot and he shot the band a couple times has done really great photographic work so we worked with his images and built the player the timeline here is draggable so the fan can kind of skip play anywhere on the set in a later build we plan to do the set list and build the set list into the player so that the fan can click and kind of jump around in the set a little bit more accurately than than the way it is now and again it's a two-hour and 5 minute long show and we did a couple of rates on this player and again what we've done is we've left ourselves the ability that we can change this content at any time with the last record with when we put out why Jeff we had links coming to the site and the band had a release an EP in Australia they were going to play the Big Day Out festival and the Australian label had asked for some additional material to put so they re-released the record with a bonus EP and then there were discussions at the label about wanting to release the bonus EP which was like six tracks from the record and but they were kind of having an issue about like they weren't sure how they wanted to do it they weren't sure what the price point was going to be or anything and I was like well why you give it away off the disc and they were like what are you talking about and I was like well we can just have people come from the CD and come to the server so if anybody's got the record they can have the you EP for free and despite the fact that a year earlier when the record came out I had explained this to the label no one really kind of got it until I explained to them so what we did was on the one-year anniversary of the first record coming out we gave fans again a skin player that offered them six free songs it built in the streaming player and then a download button built into the player that brought them to the site and I'll show you that that destination page if I can remember the URL of it but I think this is it yeah so this is a destination page from the player and what we did because we didn't have any sort of like sophisticated check back system we did something really simple which was we asked people to enter a five digit code and the five digit code was the barcode number off the back of the CD and if you had that code then it allowed you access to the download of the song you could get the player and hear the stream but you can get to the download section without in theory entering the entering thing but one of the really neat things about Wilco is just that they've been very generous with their content they've been they just see this as a great opportunity and they've been really amazing about just giving it to the fans they spend a good amount of money giving content to their fans and we've really seen the returns on at the prior two Yankee Hotel Foxtrot coming out the highest Bandit ever been in the billboard charge was number 70 the most records bandit sold was two hundred and twenty thousand Yankee Hotel Fox starts at four hundred and seventy thousand copies sold right now and this record like I said is done somewhere around eighty or ninety thousand copies in its first week out so what we did here was we did like the free EP three covers you could download the cover we did PDFs of the cover so fans could print them out and basically make their own bonus CD we just gave it to people in exchange for buying the Recker and that's really the kind of stuff we've done to try to you know again use they use QuickTime as much as we can because again I just really love it we've got a really great working relationship with Glenn and the team support from you know me calling them on three days notice and telling them I'm going to be doing a webcast from the moon to just you know me getting killed bandwidth wise and them helping out and it's just been a great working relationship and I think that pretty much covers covers it so I'll be happy to answer your questions I'll be around all week so anybody wants to talk [Applause]