SongTouch - working to build the kingdom
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.
TQ: I have to admit, I was really impressed compared to Apple iTunes - you guys are going after them.
David: Well, you know what? In iTunes, they’ve done a phenomenal thing. They’ve introduced the digital market. They’ve got a great product in their iPod product. They own 85% of the market place right now. But, if you want to send your kid to a site where you don’t have to worry about soft porn - you don’t have to worry about P Diddy, Emenim, or Marilyn Manson - then you don’t want to send your kids to iTunes because they’re going to get all of that at iTunes. You’re not going to get all that at SongTouch. That’s the commitment we’ve made to our consumers. We are a trusted source. Here’s the problem today: it used to be, just a year ago, that the only way that you could buy digital music was with a credit card. So, parents had to be involved in the purchase of digital music. Now you can go into a K-mart, a Wal-mart, or a Target and buy download cards. So, you don’t even need parental consent to go buy music anymore. Before, you could kind of monitor the music your kids are buying on the digital marketplace because you had to give them your credit card. Now, you don’t even have to do that. Here’s the problem, it used to be, you could look at the album jacket, the jewel, or even pull out the insert and read the lyrics and help your youth determine whether this is appropriate music or not. If there was a parental advisory or explicit lyrics, well, “Hey, we’re not going to listen to it.” Now, all you have it two ear-buds. You have no clue what your kids are listening to. So, the only way you can monitor is now is to make sure your kids are buying their content from a trusted source. That’s what we tried to bring with SongTouch. You don’t have to worry about that. Our guarantee is: “You won’t find explicit lyrics. You won’t find parental advisory labeled music.” Right now, you can download on iTunes the filming of the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. There are naked women - topless women in that video … and that’s what you can get on iTunes. I don’t know if you’ve been watching on the news the last couple of days, this thirteen year old boy whose been testifying before Congress who got tied into the porn ring through the internet. We’re not trying to solve all the worlds problems, we’re trying to give the community an alternative to the other tools that are out there that is safe, family-friendly, and legal, that has a faith-based message - and that’s really what we tried to do with SongTouch.
TQ: I see that as a liability for iTunes. If they’re open to all of that, they can’t advertise themselves as a family-friendly organization.
David: They can’t!
TQ: As long as they allow that, they can’t. And if they would advertise themselves that way, they couldn’t say that truthfully.
David: What we know, and we’re seeing this in our culture today, we have a culture today where people want responsibility without accountability. We understand that paradigm that we’re in today. What can we do to help? With SongTouch, we’re going to be the content - I don’t want to say censor, but that’s really what we are. One of the things I say a lot, “In Song Touch, there really is no first amendment” - because, we are going to censor content. We’re going to make sure, and do everything within our power that SongTouch is a safe place to go to. Your not going to have to worry about that stuff. It’s very important to us. We’ve turned down artists. We have turned down albums because it did not fit what we felt was safe and family friendly.
TQ: Another thing, iTunes can’t focus on Christian music because it’s focusing on everything. I can go to iTunes and not find some of my favorites. The older stuff, that you were talking about earlier, it may not be there.
David: Yeah.
TQ: Nobody is focusing on that. I mean, I can go to Best Buy and there are 5 or 6 aisles of CDs and there is only one 4 foot section of Christian music.
David: Yeah. The Christian market is such an under-served market. If you think about if SongTouch should not succeed, who’s going to support the Christian marketplace … because no one is. It’s such an under-served market. And if you just look at music, we’re it. And if you start looking at other things, other commodities that people buy, I mean - the Christian market is ostracized. If you consider the assault on Christians and the conservative right, organizations and businesses really don’t want to get involved in servicing the Christian marketplace because then they get labeled and tagged. But you know, we don’t apologize for what we do. We don’t apologize for who we are. We don’t apologize for our content. I’ve got broad shoulders - you know, I’m not asking for an assault to be put on me - but what I’m saying is that we understand that it is a market that is totally under-served. Here’s something that I want you to think about: If you’re going to build, are you going to build empires or build the kingdom? What’s going to last forever - for eternity? We’ve seen empires fall all over history. But if we help and work to build the kingdom, that’s what is going to last for eternity. So, our whole focus - everything that we do - nothing is tied to a profit motive. We’re not looking at it as, “We’re going to make this decision because it’s more profitable for us.” We’re going to make this decision because it helps us build the kingdom. Which is a paradigm in business that most businesses wouldn’t even consider. We exist not to profit, but we need profit to exist. And so, that’s why we do the affiliate. We give them the opportunity to make money. We’re passing money to church organizations, para-church organizations. Do we need to do that? No. But if we can help out an organization to bring in a little bit of revenue to help their cause through something that people are going to do anyway, we’re willing to do it. So, when you look at that business model, people say, “Well, how are you guys going to make it?” Well, here’s how we’re going to make it. Before we even started this thing, Howard and myself and a couple of other people were asked this question: Do we believe that the face of God is on this thing? If we believe that, then we have nothing to worry about - and our success right now, we can attribute to that.
TQ: …and God will honor that.
David: Yeah. That’s right. We’re planting a seed. If you were to plant a corn seed in a field, if you water it and nurture it, what are you going to get? In a season you’re going to get a corn stalk and you’ll get the fruit, but what happens? The fruit then produces more seed. And so you get more and more fruit. That’s all we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be mindful of the fact that if we plant the seed - in this case we’re planting the seed of safe, family-friendly entertainment - that God will multiply that seed into more fruit, in which that produces more seeds. And we’re seeing right now - we have opportunities to go into Australia, Latin America, China, Asia Pacific, Europe … the only problem we have is resources. You know? How do we make all of these things happen?
TQ: You want to talk about the technical side - scalability and the data setup…
David: Right now, from a technology perspective, it’s all html. It’s only available today on the PC. It’s not available on the Mac today. The reason for that is the whole proprietary DRM. Now, if you’ve been following the news, you heard what happened in France where they are outlawing the sales of iPods and iTunes because they’re closed architecture. So, they’re making them open it up. We are also prepared, probably the latter part of this year, that SongTouch will be available on the Mac. We’re watching the French case before we spend a lot of money on development because what typically happens is that it starts moving West. If they adapt to the French, they’ll probably adapt for everybody. So, that is something we’re very concerned about. We know that a lot of the people that don’t use SongTouch say, “Well, is it compatible with my iPod?” No. That’s a problem for us. We’re going to be launching in May our own MP3 player.
When I designed this thing and I started thinking about where we were going to go, I tried to think of all of the reasons people wouldn’t want to use SongTouch. One of them is the device. Is it iPod compatible? No, it isn’t but we’re working to make that happen. But the second thing is, let’s make a device available to the consumer that is functionable - has all of the features and functions of the leading devices - but is also cost conducive. So, we’re going to be offering a device in May under $100. It’s going to be a 1 gig and a 5 gig device that has radio, the search features and more. It’s a feature rich product for under a hundred bucks. And all the affiliates will get a commission as they sell them as well. Is it a big money maker for us? No. Do you want to make a million dollars off of one customer or a dollar off of a million? So, we’re of the mindset of “Let’s let everyone benefit - let’s share the wealth, and create this community.” We’re working with a mobile company. Imagine this, you can go to your cell phone and download. From your cell phone you hear music from Song Touch and stream it right there on your cell phone. You put ear buds in it and you’ve got stereo right there on your cell phone. So then, the iPod device or the MP3 device really becomes obsolete. We’re also looking at bringing video to Song Touch. That will probably be here by the end of the year. We’re also looking at gaming. Again, the vision is music and Christian entertainment. So, we’re looking at gaming. We’re working with a gaming company right now to develop some Christian games. We’re not prepared to announce what it is yet but there’s some real exciting things that we’re going to have in place that’s going to be the first of its kind - a Christian, family friendly, safe content based game. So, again, it’s bigger than just the music thing.
Tags: Music, News and Media, Podcasts, Technology
