Thought Quotient

John 12:32

But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.

(image from the Mel Gibson production The Passion of the Christ)

Related Links:

• What did He die for?
• Everyone has scars…even Jesus
• A biblical word study - PROPITIATION

Last week, we had the privilege of sitting down and chatting with David Dickinson who is the vice president of operations for SongTouch.com …

TQ: You guys deal with music. I’m just curious - did you come from a musical family? What did you grow up listening to? You know, we’ve gone from cassettes and CDs to downloads now. We’ve got a whole generation growing up with its music being just computer files - sort of an intangible object.

David: Let me tell you a little bit about my background. I have no music experience. I came from corporate America - 27 years as an executive in telecom and wafer manufacturing for microprocessors. In 1999, I left that and got involved with Howard Rachinski who is the president and CEO of CCLI and he shared with me this idea that he had. It was a vision about 8 or 9 years ago to create a digital conduit for the Christian community that would bring - initially music - but music and Christian entertainment that is friendly, safe and legal to the faith based community. He asked me if I would do a feasibility study and help him see if there is a market for this. So, I did that. For the last 3 years we’ve been building SongTouch. We launched SongTouch last year and this week is our one year anniversary of SongTouch. So, you know, the only musical ability I have is the ability to turn on the power of my stereo (laugh) and the volume control, but since I’ve been here and involved in it, it’s been a blast. It’s been a great, great ride. I’m a lot older than I probably look. The music I listened to is the old Andrae Crouch, Chuck Girard, Barry McGuire, 2nd Chapter of Acts. Matter of fact, last night I got to spend the evening with Andrae Crouch and Bill Morris and his wife - sitting behind a piano and jamming for 6 hours. So, that’s the legacy of music that I came from.

If you look at SongTouch today, and if you look at most digital download sites, the demos that they generally adhere to is 18-24 and maybe up to about 29 or 30 (years of age). But no one is really addressing the needs of the family. Today if you look at our culture and the influences in our culture today, it’s music and television. There was a recent study I just read that said that kids today are listening to 8 hours of music a day and that there are significant behavioral changes when they listen to 8 hours worth of music. So, we started thinking, “Well, who is doing something for our youth - our young kids - the kids that are going to be listening to music 10 years from now?” - and no one was doing anything. Focus on the Family is in my backyard. I spent the last 10 months negotiating with Focus on the Family - “What can we do to bring your children’s content - your ‘Adventures in Odyssey‘ content - your radio/theater content - and then also Dr Dobson’s radio broadcast to SongTouch?” And we worked it all out and right now we are their only digital site that is offering Focus on the Family content for kids. What we’re finding is that there’s this tremendous loyalty to the Odyssey series. We had Odyssey give-a-ways that went in the first day! We were thinking we were going to have enough for the week. Well, they were all gone in the first day. So, there’s a tremendous demand for that content. Focus is our first supplier of children’s content, and we’re going to be constantly looking for more. You know, I think the unique factor about SongTouch that is unique compared to any other online site is: We don’t exist to profit, but we need to profit to exist. Which is what kind of got us into the affiliate program. We know that most organizations probably could not afford to build a digital site like we built. We also know that there are constituencies that we would never reach that maybe a church would be able to reach, or an artist would be able to reach because they have their fan base and their congregation base. And you could do all the marketing you want, and the likelihood of hitting them sometimes is slim. But if I can give you the service, and they now trust you as their pastor or as a fan base - and you tell them to “Go to my website and buy digital music”, we’re going to reach a base of consumers that we would never be able to reach. So, what we’re going to do, is we give you SongTouch - essentially for free - put your brand and label on it, also give you the ability to customize the site - make it look and have the feel of your particular band, group, or organization. It’s not one of those template type things where all of the affiliates look the same. They won’t. If you have an HTML programmer available to you, if you don’t we’ll provide one for you for a nominal fee. We can really do some extreme customizations so that it would look nothing like you see now.

TQ: So, basically, the back-end would be you, and the front-end would the affiliate site?

David: We host it. We maintain it. We do all of the maintenance. We do all of the development. We do all the contracts with the labels. We pay all of the fees. It’s as simple as, “You sell, you cash the check.” It takes you about 20 minutes to set up your site. When I envisioned how we were going to lay it out, I saw one of those yellow ‘for dummy’ books and I thought, “How can I make this?” My wife is very much intimidated by the internet. I used my wife as the focus group. If I can get my wife to be able set up a website, then anyone can do it. I mean, she has a hard enough time just finding out how to type in her password when she logs onto email. So, I used her as the focus group. Literally, it takes you 20 minutes to customize your website and select your content. See, here’s another thing that we allow you to do, you get to select what music you want on your homepage. So, if you’re Chris Tomlin, and Chris Tomlin has a website, he can have just Chris Tomlin music on his webpage. Or if you have an affinity to Hip Hop, your homepage can be just Hip Hop - whatever you want to choose. So, it really gives you that ability to have a custom flavor. If you like vanilla ice cream, make it vanilla ice cream. If you like chocolate chip mint, you can make it chocolate chip mint. That was the whole theory behind it. But the other thing is, SongTouch … music is just really the beginning. What we really see is, we want to be the conduit to the Christian community for their music and entertainment needs where they don’t have to compromise their faith, their morals, or their values for their entertainment needs. We get asked all the time, “Why don’t you put secular music out there?” We have the largest Christian catalog in the industry right now.
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