principles and objectives
Below are some of the core principles we are working from; and the core objectives that are guiding and directing the development of our technology.
customer identity & profile
We want to know our customer. What do they want? How do they perceive us? What do they expect from us? How do they interact with us? How do we most effectively reach them, engage them, create a relationship with them? What have they bought from us? What music do they like? What bands are they fans of? What community sites do they use? Who are their friends and buddies? We will build technology that will enable us to answer these types of questions.
customer engagement
It's critical for us to effectively "sell" our artists, and to create a relationship with our customers/fans. This means that we really need to convey our artist's whole image and personality on their web site; that we need to engender an emotional/visceral reaction from the fan such that they want to deepen their relationship with the artist. We need to do this not only on the artist website, but we need to take that content, marketing and selling and extend it to all of the artists' electronic presences; myspace page, etc. through a variety of means, including live HTML links, RSS, etc. We will also reach out to customers via email, IM, text messaging, etc.
measurement, analysis, improvement
Do we know whether our sites are meeting our business objectives? How? We want to understand (i.e. measure) what our customers are doing on our sites and use this info to continuously adjust and improve them. Some basic questions that we need to answer: how many visitors do we get? where are they coming from? how many of them come back? how often? what do they do when they come back, what are they looking for? are they getting what they are looking for? how many of them visit multiple sites of ours? how do we best engage them? what kinds of promotions are effective? if we have two different approaches to something, how do we know which one is more effective? We will develop technology that will allow us to answer such questions.
usability
Can customers do what they want on our web-sites? Does the site behave as they expect? Is it easy for them to do this? Is it fun? How do we make it easier for them, and therefore more effective for us? How do we make it fun for them, so that they enjoy the experience? How do we learn from what other sites are doing? Discovering this is key to our success, and we will be doing what it takes to build sites that our customers love to interact with.
efficiency
Computers are really good at some things, so let's take advantage of them to make us more efficient. For example, we need to enable a "publish once" model that will enable our labels/artists to create content once, and have it published all of the appropriate places on the internet; adding a tour date should happen once and automagically get published on the label site, the artist site, MySpace and wherever else we think it's important.
commerce
We want to be the source for our bands music, merch, samples, downloads, full song streaming, tour bookings, etc. We want to fill this need on our commerce site(s), on our label sites, on our band sites, and anywhere on the internet where our artists are promoting themselves. We want to be able to "extend" our electronic presence to live on myspace, tagalong, AIM, cell phones, etc. We need a richly functioned software platform to do this, and we need to create a digital music distribution platform to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and flexibility of digital delivery.
world-class technology
We are putting together a team that will be second-to-none in understanding how to appropriately apply technology to the music business.
