The human touch: sound libraries need to make searching and downloading easy without being impersonal - Industry Overview

Post, Sept, 2002 by Edmond M. Rosenthal

"Music is emotional -- and on a search engine, all of the personality goes away," surmises Russell Emanuel, CEO of London's Extreme Music. That's why his music library is hedging its bet on the future of online search and downloading of sound. While it's following the trend of fully automated service, it's also one of the first to offer a compromise, and other libraries are expected to to follow suit.

The new option is Instant Music Search (IMS), which puts the client live into a chat room with one of four music supervisors that are on duty at any given time. Emanuel says the supervisor can play tracks and download files while chatting with the customer. Thousands of music searches are being done each week on IMS, he notes.

Emanuel is not alone in the realization that a human touch is still in demand. Randy Thornton, president of Non-Stop Productions and partner in Non-Stop Music Library in Salt Lake City, reports the next step in his company's online evolution will be chat rooms for customized searches. Beyond that, he expects to offer the ability of a client to deliver a 30-minute program to his library when Non-Stop is called upon to do the music supervision.

His conclusion is that a library can't go exclusively in either direction: "You need to have the convenience of the automated search system, backed up by a knowledgeable customer-service team."

Standard online search now represents about 30 percent of client search activity, according to feedback at North Hollywood's Megatrax. Composer Ron Mendelsohn explains, "You still have to have a human being behind a search system. A lot of our customers will always want to speak to someone, and we have a 10-person customer service team that knows the library inside and out."

GOING TO ONLINE EXTREMES

For its traditional search-and-delivery mechanism, Extreme Music has a joint effort with the three libraries of EMI and four of Zomba. The total of eight libraries are accessed via the Play search engine, either via Extreme Music's Web site (www.extrememusic.com) or directly through playextrememusic.com. Keywords and categories are offered in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish -- with Portuguese and Japanese soon to be added. Clients can download MP3s or order discs.

Emanuel says the online service is typically used by major advertising agencies, film music supervisors and post production facilities. "Some of them just leave the online system open with us 24 hours a day," he notes.

SOUND SUBSCRIPTIONS

Meanwhile, Gerd Leonhard, founder/ president of License Music (www.licensemusic.com), asserts, "The biggest change in the industry will be providing subscription-based services where the user does not have to take physical possession of the music."

LicenseMusic recently went through a change of its own: it was acquired by Charly Acquisitions of Guernsey, England. Shutting down its San Francisco operation for four months to reorganize, it was relaunched in England on August 1. It is offering more than 30,000 precleared tracks online. Central to the new set-up is a subscription service with an annual fee, allowing the use of any track over the course of a year. Generally there is a separate license for each medium used by the subscriber, but there are also package prices for those involved, for example, in feature films, TV series and commercials.

Leonhard notes an independent film producer would pay an annual fee of $1,000, while a corporate user could pay as little as $500.The more popular songs in the library are not part of the subscription service.

The company's automated search mechanism allows use of some 3,000 keywords, ranging from "ballgames" to "Pacific Rim native folk styles." Leonhard says it usually takes about 12 minutes for a customer to find a song, license it and download it. For a CD-quality recording, it takes approximately another 15 minutes for downloading, provided that the client has a good Internet connection, such as DSL or T-I. On a standard modem, this takes about an hour and a half.

He says many clients opt to download the more-quickly-delivered MP3 file, generally used as a temporary track or for previewing. The CD-quality is 70MB, while an MP3 file is 4 MB. He estimates half of clients download in MP3 and are sent a CD for production. Those downloading CD-quality are largely motion picture and TV producers, who generally have powerful Internet connections.

LicenseMusic is in the process of engaging a new service provider in Europe for hosting the site and providing the audio.

MEGATRAX: ENTIRELY DIGITIZED

Ron Mendelsohn claims Megatrax (www.megatrax.com) was one of the first to digitize its library and put all of its titles online. All of its approximately 10,000 tracks are accessible using the MusicSource search engine, provided by UK-based Counterpoint Software. The search criteria is laid out by genre, style, instrument, tempo, composer, keyword or any combination thereof.

As of September 1, clients were expected to be able to audition tracks, stream them online and download them in the Windows Media format. This was also to involve saving them in CD-quality as WAV or AIF files. Mendelsohn points out, "Windows Media is a compressed format but the difference from CD-quality is not noticeable."