Ep. 61: Musicnotes' Dan Heiliger and Tom Nauman on Trends in Digital Sheet Music

Well, why don’t you two introduce yourselves, say who you are and what you do.

Yeah, I’m Dan Heiliger, CFO and Vice President of Musicnotes. I handle all things finance and a fair amount of operations here at musicnotes.com.

Tom Nauman, Chief Publications Officer, I’ve been with the company since almost the beginning. Started in 1998, so 26th year here.

Basically, I and my team are in charge of making the product, making sure that the product is of a quality we need, and getting all that stuff up to the site for sale. It’s an interesting job for a guy with a music degree, and happy to be here.

And are both of you musicians?

Yes, I’ve been a piano player since the age of five. I still play piano on the weekends at church regularly.

I started playing trombone in the fourth grade, and played through college at the University of Wisconsin, in their marching band, dabbling guitar just a touch, and have sung a little bit in the past.

Sounds good. I am a classical guitarist by training. Started off as most people do in high school, noodling around on electric guitar and stuff like that.

But when it came time to get serious, decided to study classical. I have a degree in performance, and that’s gone a long way to help in this job, obviously.

Classical guitar music is notationally pretty complex, so it was a good test bed to get my head around the concepts and the exceptions of language and things like that. Also involved with a local nonprofit, Madison Classical Guitar Society.

It’s just a small performing organization that tries to bring music into town and stuff like that. We put on concerts and other events and do some outreach. And yeah, nice little nonprofit on the side there, so that’s a fun thing for us.

Yeah.

So how did you end up in these roles? It’s not the typical career path for a pianist and a classical guitarist to end up running a digital music company.

Yeah, exactly. That’s a good question, Garrett. Going into my latter years of high school, I was in band, choir, taking piano lessons.

I knew I wanted to keep music a part of my life. So I thought about auditioning to the School of Music here in Madison, Wisconsin at the university, change gears a little bit, and went pre-business.

And going into pre-business, I still wanted to play the trombone, and Madison had a great marching band, so continued on with trombone for four years.

But fast forward into my college careers, got my degree in business accounting, and my dad said, hey, you can make a little more money doing business versus straight music. And I said, okay, I’ll get my degree in business.

And was he right?

Maybe, maybe not.

It works so far.

But to fast forward after I got my accounting degree, is that for my CPA exam, worked in public accounting for five, six years as an auditor.

So financial auditor by trade, auditing external financial statements, learned a lot, learned a lot, learned quickly, worked a lot of hours, but the burnout in public accounting is pretty quick. But managed five years in public accounting.

So it’s not just the music industry?

No.

Where you burn out in five years?

No, exactly. It comes across the whole board. But when I was auditing and doing financial statement reviews, Musicnotes was one of my clients.

So I worked with Chairman Tim Ryland, who was a CFO at the time, and I had an inside track to the books and records of Musicnotes.

And so I thought, hmm, the controller at the time was nearing retirement age, and this might be a fun, fun gig if the job ever opened up.

So then a couple years after I got out of CPA, I’ve got word that the controller was retiring and they needed a replacement. So being a musician, a lifetime musician myself, and love of numbers, so numbers and music kind of go together hand in hand.

I applied for the controller job, and Tim remembered me, and the rest is history. So I’ve been with Musicnotes about 10 years now, and it’s great. Just love looking at the books and records from every angle and managing, and it’s been great.

Great people here. A lot of fun.

And my story is convoluted. It’s a music job. Throughout college, I had always done lessons and things like that.

And music being my path, I always kind of anticipated that going into education or something along those lines was going to be, as a career path, the thing I do. I went to college in Dubuque, Iowa.

Great town, small town, a small city, and knew that I wanted to, just having taught lessons, beginner guitar, all that kind of stuff, knew that I wanted to teach at a higher level. So I would need an advanced degree for that.

And to do that, I need to come to Madison, because Madison had a formal classical guitar program. So I moved to Madison and intended to work here for a year to get residency to continue on in the education process.

And during my time here, I got a recommendation from a concertizing guitarist that, oh, there’s this publisher in town called AR Editions, that does kind of musicalogical research publications, so lots of historical music and stuff like that.

And every once in a while, they put out a job listing for someone to do music typesetting.

Again, this is 90s, so computer music engraving was still pretty new, but it was something that I had studied in school and was all about it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I did, I went and I applied for a job at AR Editions, just to see, dropped off my resume. And when I got there, Musicnotes had started. The concept of Musicnotes was already off the ground and there were people there.

So I dropped off my resume and they’re like, is this for AR Musicnotes? I’m like, bo-hoo. So luckily, they got in touch with the right people and got on that way, came in as a sheet music editor.

Yeah, basically doing all the music typesetting, engraving work, finishing up the multimedia files in the same kind of way that we still do today. Over time, about 2004, I got promoted to manager.

And then beyond that, director and chief, and we’ve got a new manager, good team. So a lot of right place, right time, which is a lot about opportunity and being open to taking them. And that’s what happened there.

What is it about Wisconsin?

I mean, you got Musicnotes, you got Heiliger, like why is all this published music here?

That’s a really good question. I’ve wondered the same thing because there was a lot of print infrastructure, Heiliger uses regional printers and things like that.

So the physical printing and book distribution being centrally located is handy for that. But that’s kind of the only thing I can, we’ve always been digital. So the actual gravity of where we are is less of a factor.

But Heiliger being so close and everybody else is on the coasts or in Nashville.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s a, I’ve always wondered the same question, like why Wisconsin being hell honored, Musicnotes pretty close down the I-90 corridor.

I mean, that’s what, 80 percent of like sheet music, 75, I don’t know how you measure it, but it’s a lot.

In the heart of the Midwest here in Derry state, but we do have the university here, a few tech spinoffs and startups are two of our co-founders, Tom Hall and Walter Burt, tech minded.

So being in Madison and a few tech gurus, I’m not surprised, but it is kind of a unique situation.

I don’t know if the centralized location argument actually holds water. Musicnotes used to also sell and ship physical books. And our warehouse for that was on the East Coast.

So, yeah, that’s a really good question, though. I don’t know why it’s here, but we’re a digital company, we’re global.

I mean, Cathy’s here, that’s why Musicnotes is here. But there’s more than just y’all, which is just interesting to think about.

So, the whole premise of Musicnotes was to be a digital first music company, or digital only, depending on how you define that.

Digital first, I think, is fair. The concept came out of a time when it was still CD sales, iTunes didn’t exist yet, and it was always the thing where you’d go to a music store. Either your local music store would have the selection.

If you’re looking for something that’s a little off the beaten path, you couldn’t go to Amazon.

You’d have to go to the music store, and if they didn’t have it, you’d have to order it and have to wait for that to come in, and then you’re going to get a third hand copy that’s marked up. Same idea with books.

You only want to play that one song from the band you like, but you have to buy the whole book from the music store to get it. All of those kinds of things are starting to come to the fore.

Like I mentioned, ITunes, it’s the same kind of thing where people had to buy an entire album when they wanted to get the new hit single, that kind of thing. So that movement was already kind of in motion.

But one of the things that got my attention about this job in the first place was earlier days of the Internet. It was a digital ethereal product that you could actually deliver something physical through the Internet.

You could sell someone something that they could print out and have tangibly in front of them. And that was kind of rare for a product at the time.

Plus, they could only get that song if they just wanted that song, they didn’t need to buy the whole book. So that motion was kind of happening. And the founders, in addition to Kathy, were both tech guys, they’re both programmers.

Tom Hull had written the software that I mentioned from AR, the proprietary house software that we used, added all of the stuff that we created internally. Notation editor built in the 80s, modified in the 90s.

We’ve been modifying it ever since and still use it. But that idea, having that asset, that engraving program to work with, one of the first, and then Walter was kind of a web guru.

And they kind of came together and said, you know, we could use this, we’ve got this file type in these graphics, we could marry that with some mini playback and also be able to deliver that in a web plugin to a user and have them get it.

So that was the whole concept. Digital first, definitely. Books came later.

Over time, we moved away from actual physical shipping for many reasons. But yeah, we’re digital forward now, we’re delivering very well to a lot of people, I think.

Yeah, we were really split in the early days between physical and digital. I remember my first exposure to Musicnotes, I was high schooler trying to get a piano flute duet.

And the music store didn’t have it, and we needed it in two weeks for Christmas. And my mom goes online and we find the song. So Musicnotes drop shipped it from the East Coast Warehouse to my home here in Stoughton, Wisconsin, just south of Madison.

And I had it, had it in a couple of days. Was able to practice it, rehearse it, play it right in front for church that Christmas. So it’s that speed of delivery, fast, easy.

Now we’re digital only, but having to write from your own printer or use our apps now. You can just consume it as soon as you purchase it, that speed delivery, and then our vast library just makes it so easy for the consumer to get that song quick.

Same kind of experience for me as a classical guitarist. There wasn’t a whole lot around here. You kind of went with the large collected books and the public domain stuff.

But if there was any new composition, stuff happening, people still write for that instrument. Some amazing music is coming out of it, but it was hard to find.

So having that kind of digital platform where you could actually have everything never be out of stock, it’s always there.

Yeah, published once, always in stock.

I find Musicnotes to be a really interesting sort of case study of the industry because you do a little bit of everything, right?

You’re a licensing company in some respects because you’re getting the rights for people like me to publish arrangements.

You’ve got artists on YouTube that are publishing through y’all, but you’re also a distributor carrying other people’s products, other publishers, but you’re also publishing your own editions and your own arrangements of things.

And so it’s this really interesting mix of all different parts of the industry. How do you decide what you’re going to put on the site? How do you decide what songs, what formats?

Obviously, you’re not going to open up your ultra-sensitive company strategy, but how do you go about making those decisions? Is it data-driven? Is it instinct?

Is it something else?

Good combination of both. Mostly data-driven. We do spend a lot of time on the numbers and the metrics.

We have partnerships, obviously, that you need to honor. You have people publishing new music and they want it out in timelines. We try to honor that as well, as best we can.

But yeah, when it comes to the things that we actually embark to invest upon or invest in ourselves, the new creation of a new transcription of a new pop song that came out or whatever, we turn to the data.

We have meetings every week where we look at search activity.

We get people who are looking for something and getting zero results, or a lot of people looking for a thing and nobody buying that thing, or some old song that’s bubbled back up in the zeitgeist for some reason, and we’re not really sure where it

came from. So we’ll look at those kinds of things and say, oh, this is a TikTok trend. Somebody did this on YouTube. This was performed at the Grammys.

Figure out where that interest is coming from. Figure out if it’s going to last long enough to actually make its money back.

And there are some things where you just need to have it out there in multiple forms so that the person who’s looking for it, okay, they might not want the piano vocal, maybe they just want a solo piano, or maybe they play clarinet and they just want

the melody. You know, we try to make sure that we can make an arrangement, but we can also make all those other versions of it for those other use cases. So we try to maximize the titles that we’ve got. But that’s the short answer.

And the intuition side is, we’ve got a term that we call sheet music friendly. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff where it’s a hook or a loop, and you give the entirety of what you’d play on an instrument away in the first two bars.

And that just keeps going. You know, there’s a lot of music out that does that.

So that’s an easy transcribe, man.

It’s an easy transcribe. It’s a tough sale.

Take the win.

You put it on the website and that first page gives away everything. So yeah, we need to pick and choose. It needs to be something that we believe people are going to spend some time with and actually get some value out of.

Sheet music is different that way. It’s not a passive experience for the most part. People actually need to sit down and spend some time with it.

You don’t just, you know, passively read 75 songs in a day. At least most people don’t. So yeah, we try to make sure that the people are actually going to use it, have something to use.

So would you say the approach then is more trying to make sure that everything that goes on the site is a banger and a success?

Or is it more about trying to find that one thing that’s a hit, you know? Kind of throwing out 20 different things, and if one of them takes off, then that batch was considered a success.

It’s a little bit of both, but you know, like Tom said, we do mine the data to a point where we know certain types of arrangements sell better than others.

So we’ll start with one, like the piano, vocal, guitar, or our own Singer Pro first, and then we can get that on the site first, you know, take, put the investment in that makes sense up front, but don’t spend all the time and effort to do everything

So we can, you know, offer less costly versions if we’re kind of on the fence about it, if we just want to try something.

When people show up, we don’t want them to say no search results. We don’t want them to find nothing, but we’re kind of on the fence.

Maybe it’s not the most sheet music friendly, or maybe we think it’s not going to last as long, or whatever the reasoning is. We can offer something like a chord chart or a lead sheet.

You know, there’s something that people can find, and, you know, a lead sheet is perfectly useful. You can get the chord changes in the lyrics. You can work from that.

It’s fairly inexpensive to make, but still useful to the people who need it. And if that does well, then we expand. Or likewise, if we get something that we know is going to work, we’re fairly confident it’s going to work, we’ll put it out there.

If it performs well, we start making other things from that as well. So we’ll break that out in other types of arrangements and get that coverage that I was talking about before, making sure that every use case is covered.

We do have some loss leaders for sure, but I mean, there’s part of that is the investment and the perception that, you know, if you’re looking for something, you’re gonna find it here. This is the place you come for that kind of thing.

Even if you’re looking for some obscure video game soundtrack title. You know, you’re likely to find it here. So, yeah, that’s a cool thing.

Yeah, I will add that our sales mix, you know, can be somewhat predictable.

Christmas songs, holiday tunes sell very well for us. So we know going into Q4 every year, we’re gonna put a special effort there.

You know, we do have what we call evergreen songs that just sell year in and year out, no matter when published, over the rainbow, hallelujah, titles that just do really well for us because they’re great popular titles and never go out of style.

And, you know, the aspiring singer or pianist wants to learn how to play that song because everyone’s heard it.

Yeah, it’s surprising how much evergreens are a part of our daily, you know, it’s just people are constantly always looking for those songs, yeah.

So what’s the balance between those evergreen things and the, let’s call them, trend driven things? Like I’m on the Musicnotes site right now, and like half the top songs at the moment are all from Wicked. Not a huge surprise there, right?

But then you also have like George Frederick Handel, you know, Passecaglia, and it’s like…

That was actually a freebie. We gave that away recently, so that was…

Okay, so maybe that, so that explains that one.

That bubbled it up, yup.

Yeah, but it’s just interesting, you know, Interstellar is still on here, I think that’s not a new movie.

So, you know, do you have any sense of what online sales is driven by, you know, the moment of these are the movies that are out, these are the things on TikTok, these are the videos people are watching, versus just, you know, here’s the next year’s

Yeah, we are leaning towards the evergreen side, which carries the bulk of our sales.

I won’t divulge our crown jewels of what’s the exact split, but, you know, an 80-20 rule is in force here, in fact, that meaning that the year in and year out evergreens and the older songs do help carry the business through when maybe the new pop

songs, there’s not as many good ones as there used to be, you know, so it’s a fine mix. We have our own public domain arrangements. We offer freebies every month.

So it’s, we kind of intersperse that mix to kind of keep it fresh and new for folks to keep coming back.

That is one of the interesting metrics, because one of the things we can track is percentage of sales coming from things that were released in the last X time period.

And that’s kind of an indicator of the health of the industry as a whole, because you can see, you know, if we’ve only got two songs that were released in the last six months, that are still in the top ten, you know, if, like you said, if Hallelujah

is the top of the sales chart. Yeah, it’s like we’re not, we’re not, there’s not anything really strong hitting with people right now. And that’s the thing you got to be careful of with the real space content and stuff like that. It is, it’s catchy.

Everybody starts looking for it, but they look for it for a couple of months. And, you know, you got to make it available. So again, you got that perception that, oh, Musicnotes has that as well.

But yeah, just got to keep an eye on it.

So what percentage of your total revenue is Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah? Give me that number, at least.

It’s a good number. It’s a long date. We have a couple hundred thousand titles, but it’s definitely more than it’s fair share.

And that’s another one of those things too, where there’s several, several versions of it.

Well, I mean, that’s the customer service rabbit hole too, because Leonard Cohen himself wrote like 75 verses for that song, and different versions change over time.

And we get to have that argument several times a year with someone who says, this isn’t the right thing. And it’s, well, it was right. He performed it in 1978 this way, that one time on this one show, and omitted that verse that you like.

So it’s a fun thing, but yeah, that title as a whole is well fleshed out by many, many publishers and people.

It’s interesting, going back to what you said about, going back to what you said about what selling being sort of an indication of the health of the music industry as a whole, or maybe how much is selling being sort of an indicator.

Just from, you know, my vantage point is mostly in choral education or like ensemble, you know, school education.

I certainly see it there that a lot of the music they’re looking for is not the current stuff because the current stuff is not sheet music friendly. And so it’s really interesting to kind of see the ups and downs that go along with that.

Have you found a trick for that? Like how to make something that’s not sheet music friendly passable? Like how do you adapt something like that?

Oh, that’s a really good question.

I already dated myself with this company, but the whole dubstep era. You get EDM titles and things like that, things that we’re transcribing for piano primarily. And you get those things that are not possible to play on an acoustic instrument.

Just some of those dance titles or just anything of that experimental electronic genre. People look for it. It’s hugely popular.

You kind of got to figure out what to do to emulate some of those whoops and boops to make it something that someone could perform. And anyone who’s listening to it is going to go, I know what that is. So it is a challenge sometimes.

But that’s the whole sheet music friendly thing.

We will take a chance on some of those, but we tend to gravitate towards the things that actually have that discernible identifiable mood to them, the chord progression thing, things that go through a harmony in a way that makes sense for someone to

I think Swoops and Boops is the name of your next album.

Let me know when it’s ready.

Okay, Swoops and Boops.

I’ll do some charts for you.

It’ll be great. I know your editors, and we’ve gotten pretty creative at times, but they do a nice job at making the non-sheet music friendly songs playable on the piano. And they come out pretty good.

There’s a lot of tricks, but that’s the art of it.

It’s not something… There’s a lot of AI tools out there and stuff like that now, so you can feed that stuff in there, and it’ll give you a starting point.

But there is an art to making something that’s possible and might actually be enjoyable for a person to play at home. So that’s the goal.

Well, since you brought it up, what is AI going to do to the sheet music industry?

It’s really interesting.

Tom, I’ll let you take that one.

No, there’s tools there, definitely. I mean, we got stems extraction, things that are all over the place. You can take a fully mixed thing and really peel it apart to hear the insides of it that you might get lost in the mix, which is great.

People use those all the time. There’s also transcription tools coming out of that as well. Some are better than others, but I don’t think any of them are quite there yet.

I like to say there’s a grammar to it. There’s an art, but it’s also a grammar.

You can misspell things readily if you don’t know what you’re doing, beam things wrong or make things more difficult to read, which is where the actual professional editor touch comes in.

You don’t realize it’s a problem until you see something that you can’t count because the beaming is all off. You’ve got eighth notes tied to eighth notes, tied to eighth notes, tied to eighth notes, for ad infinitum.

That’s the kind of stuff that comes out of AI currently. It is getting better.

We’re definitely keeping an eye on it, but I see it as a tool to enable people to work better, same as it is in programming, same as it is in any other kind of writing or any of those other things.

You can get a script from AI, but you probably want to revise it a bit yourself before you actually say the things that are in the AI script. That’s the state of the state.

I think it’s a suite of good tools that are getting better, but there’s still something to be said for people who actually know the proper grammar and how to bring it all together.

Yeah, I’ll quickly add that Musicnotes, we pride ourselves in being the quality sheet music provider.

It’s going to be the right notation on the page, as Tom just elaborated, but you buy a piece from us, it’s going to be correct, especially our interactive products, editors touching every single one of those notes on a page.

So we pride ourselves in having a good solid core of publication, folks, editors, the data behind it’s correct, we’re paying the appropriate royalties. Everything we do in touch with that sheet music, it’s kind of handcrafted.

So it’s not just run through an automatic system. Sure, we can use those tools to help us and get efficiency but at the end of the day, we’re all about quality.

Well, even though, something that should be easy for a computer to do like transposed keys, you want something that was written in A, you want it in B flat for whatever reason.

The translation that you would think a computer with semantic knowledge of what the notes are should be able to do cleanly.

We see time after time, there’s not just us, but other packages as well have some difficulty with some of those key transitions, especially if you’re trying to do a broad spectrum.

For us, we use software to make those transpositions, but the transpositions are still individually reviewed, proofed, edited to correct those foibles in there.

They go quickly, but there’s a lot of other experiences that rely on the software to do that in real time, and it doesn’t always work out automatically.

So, like I said, it is this kind of special extra touch to have real human people try to read it as a customer and make sure that it’s legible.

Obviously, I think the premise has borne out with Musicnotes being a digital music company. You’re still here. Has it turned out the way that you expected?

Or, I mean, obviously, every company has to sort of pivot as things come up, but thinking back to the beginning and what the predictions of what digital music would look like in the future, how has that sort of matched up with reality?

I would say early on, we were very content and licensing heavy. We talked earlier about getting the rights. You know, we’re a music publisher first.

We’re, in order to sell the music, we needed the rights to do those. And we’ve worked very hard on the early days, first 10 plus years of getting licenses with all of the music publishers.

You know, since the early days, quote unquote, we’ve gotten those licenses. Now, hey, we’re growing our site. We’re a tech company, so we do our own development on the web and our apps.

You know, we were around pre the app store, and now we’ve developed our own app on Apple and Android. And, you know, and lastly, we’ve really got to invest in our tech.

You know, I think in most recent history, we’ve put extra money in the tech and the tools, making our product, you know, up to the current state.

And so, you know, it’s been, we’re kind of a three-headed juggernaut, being e-commerce, B2C, doing the development, music publisher, getting those licenses, and just being able to do that development on our own platform, with our own internal

developers. So, we’ve kind of had to pivot throughout the course of history. But since COVID, it’s been a little bit of a struggle. You know, business has stagnated.

We know we’ve lost some musicians, given whether they’ve stopped performing or found other things to do. But we’re managing well.

Same with the rest of the music industry. I think the early days of COVID were great for the music industry, because everybody was picking up their hobby again. That was interesting.

Another thing there, I mean, you’re at the Musicnotes Office now, it’s a fairly, for what we’re doing, I think it’s a fairly small team.

And a lot of the reason we are still here is making sure that we’re keeping an eye on the trends, but kind of knowing which ones, or hoping we know which ones to chase.

There’s a lot of new technologies and happenings, and the whole sheet music space, you know, people making an app that has this experience or that experience.

Yeah, we like to keep our focus on the education, on literacy, on actually being able to read sheet music, not finding workarounds for it. Yeah, being a useful tool for musicians to be able to get done what they need to get done.

We’ve definitely monitored the technology and all the up and comers, and all of the sound recognition, AI.

There’s great tools.

There’s great tools, but do they have the licensing? Do they have the funding, the backing? They’ll come and go.

A lot of fades. But our foundation is built where we stick to our core, and we’ll make the necessary investments in the right areas, but we’re very picky and choosy.

So most of the time, we look at them, might turn them down, but we just got to be very picky and choosy of what we focus on, because our team is on the smaller side, like Tom said, where we’re small but mighty.

And licensing is a real hurdle there too. It’s the thing that everyone wants. You can make a great technological experience, but if you don’t have the licenses for the content, that’s going to slow things down.

So we see a lot of that come through, and it’s making the next shiny isn’t always the hard part.

It’s the relationships, the getting the licenses in place, and making sure that what you’re building is benefiting the people who create the music, as well as the app or the business that you’re creating.

Give us sort of the bird’s-eye view of just the amount of music that you have on the site. How much is going up every day, every week? What’s the size of the company in broad strokes?

Yeah, I’ll let you talk about the throughput, and then I could touch on maybe the order volume.

Sure, yeah.

Throughput, the current team size, we push about 200 units a week, give or take. And by units, I mean like individual song products. So we do a lot of that, and in addition to that, we also have the transpositions that I mentioned before.

That’s kind of separate. Also the same team, the editorial team is also the QA department, so they keep each other in line. If anybody starts slipping, somebody’s going to let them know, which is great.

But yeah, that’s current volume is about 200 units per week. It’s been as high as 500. It’s been 200.

It’s pretty standard these days. But yeah, that kind of answers that question. So we’ve got about 400,000 units on the site.

Yeah, I’d give or take 400,000 individual different types of songs on the sites, including variations and arrangements.

But we put up as many as we think customers will want on a normal basis. There’s occasional titles that we’ll put up on upon request, but we really monitor those search results, like Tom said. We’re driving 10,000 orders a day.

So we’re a high-volume, low average order value business. So we talk how many customers, average customers. I think our average order is about one, one and a half songs per order.

At most, we see a lot of people that come every six months to order a song.

Sometimes we get some one-and-dones, but we do have a nice growing membership program, which will offer the more power users, the professional musicians who do come back at us an opportunity to drive that repeat customer.

And the majority of the product is popular music. Is it not?

For the most part, yeah. Like you mentioned, we do have our public domain. We’ve got our, one of our focuses now has been solo and ensemble contest music.

We have choral content as well, obviously. Yeah, but the bread and butter of the company is those kind of singular pop titles, you know, things that most people know.

Yeah, piano, vocal, guitar is our bread and butter. We offer all instrumentation, but those top three carry a good portion of our business.

There’s kind of this idea out there for both composers and artists that kind of the way to get traction, the way to get attention is to cover a popular song and then you get noticed and then you can try to feed him something else.

Do you think that works? Or is that kind of dated?

It’s definitely a tech. Yeah, I mean, I would say it’s effective. Definitely.

There’s definitely trends. As I mentioned, the trends are getting sometimes shorter and shorter term.

Where if the new video game again is hot, it’s like the soundtrack from that video game, everybody’s going to cover that and then build their channel on that kind of content or use that to get some of their original stuff out. It does happen.

I would say that’s definitely a thing that happens and it still happens.

It’s just kind of this Catch-22, right? It’s like, I know this thing’s going to be popular. I know Wicked’s going to be popular.

So, I should probably do an arrangement of a choral arrangement of Wicked. But I also know that everyone else is thinking the same thing. And so, then you just get this like volume of music that’s all the one thing, and you end up getting lost.

But then if you do the unique thing, you don’t necessarily get found like, just like as a creative, as on the arranger side of things, picking what song to do or what format to do it in. It’s such a tricky thing.

Do you have any insight into how to figure that out and navigate that? Because a lot of people, I think, end up just sort of spinning their wheels, like, oh, I’m going to do an easy piano version of Moana.

But then it just gets lost in the thousand other versions that are out there.

Yeah, we do partner with a lot of, we talked about YouTube creators and things like that, people who do those kinds of volumes of things.

And I think they’d be wrong to presume that, even though Musicnotes can handle licensing and actually pay royalties on the sales and all that kind of stuff, to hinge that reputation on that platform alone, like put it out there and the sheet music

will stand on its own, isn’t always going to work for that to break through. You kind of have the YouTube audience is going to figure that out.

They build their audience based on the breadth of content that they’ve got as that channel, as that personality, and that drives people to their content that they can buy, which is great.

So, I mean, yes, if anytime a new song comes out, you’re absolutely right. We do get a lot of versions of different songs for different audiences. We’ve got a Colimba channel.

We’ve got people playing all these crazy different types of use cases. And it’s great to have that coverage. But people are looking for that from the creator that they trust.

And that creator kind of needs to build out that ecosystem around their brand and their channel. And that helps the sales, helps us, helps them. But yeah, I totally agree.

If you do just try to cover the loop, just submit the sheet music and don’t do anything else, that is as likely to get lost as anything, unless you’ve got a super, for your thing. So, yeah.

Yeah, I would add the signature artists, the special arrangers that do well with us are the ones that come in with a bigger channel. So obviously, the more followers, the more links we get back to us, the more sales.

So it’s the more established channels that tend to do better for us. Although we’ve had a couple of great up-and-comers, Sheet Music Boss of Australia, they’ve done really well and grown exponentially since we started with them.

So it can go both ways, but it’s more easier done if you have that kind of established channel. I will add to your point on doing covers versus originals or your unique own thing. It’s getting harder.

I’d say it’s getting muddier with just the number of mediums you can release new music. But I think our attention span of just even the recent generation post-COVID is getting so short now. I notice it with my kids.

It’s like, okay, dad, what’s next? And so the shelf life of a hot new song is becoming shorter and shorter. So it’s that short attention span.

What’s the next new song? Okay, that was yesterday. What’s today?

So it makes business a little trickier to monitor the trends.

And again, with what we would historically term as vanity publishing, people who, it’s true. I mean, people will create a thing. And if you don’t have the audience, people aren’t going to be looking for it.

So I don’t care how much you put out there. It’s not going to bubble up. You kind of need to build your audience along with the content that you’re trying to sell.

Your brand brings the interest, the mere existence of the thing doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to sell. So that makes sense. So it’s a good observation.

You’re right. It can get lost.

This has been great. Anything else you guys feel like we should cover or take again?

Yeah, I’d just say Musicnotes is here for the songwriters, the music creators, for the industry. We’re all about rewarding. We’re credit, it’s due.

We’ve paid 130 plus million in lifetime royalties. We’re fully licensed, fully legal. You know, we’re paying the creators.

We’re reaching back to the inquiries, responding to certain takedown notices where, you know, we think we’re doing it the right way. And we’ve been in the business 27 years now to support that claim, and it shows.

Yeah, we’re trusted. And that’s a good thing to have. And, you know, encourage people to sign up and try to sell their stuff on our channel, just for those reasons.

I mean, we try to reward the creators and make sure that the people who created the, if it is a cover, the people who created the original thing, you know, are also compensated. So it’s not just a free sharing ecosystem.

There’s actual value to these things, and musicians should value the content that bring them joy.

Yeah.

Well, that’s a great note to end on. We’ll put links for how to do all that in the show notes, so people can check it out, if they’re not already involved in publishing through Musicnotes. And thanks again to both of you for coming on the show.

Thanks, Garrett.

Yeah.

Thanks, Garrett. This has been a pleasure.