Hello, good morning everybody. I'm Glenn Bullich, I work on the QuickTime product marketing team. You are in 7:06, QuickTime in the Music Industry. It's pretty clear, I guess it's stating the obvious, that there's been quite a bit of change in the music industry in the last several years, and arguably a huge amount of it has been driven by technology and by the internet. A good deal of it bad, a good deal of it good for the music industry. We're here today to focus on some of the really good things that have been going on, and we're very privileged to have our two speakers today.

Dick Huey comes to us from New York, where he's been working with independent labels, delivering a huge amount of infrastructure and marketing for dozens and dozens of labels, and providing new media access and exposure for lots and lots of independent bands. Our second speaker, Ken Waagner, comes to us from an incredible history over the last several years in new media, and before that in the music industry, and we're really privileged to have him give us an update on the Wilco story, which is very famous and happy to say the number one album on iTunes right now.

There's a lot of things we'll cover here, and certainly these folks are available later on for questions. We'll hold questions until the end, and then they'll be floating in and out of the QuickTime lab, so they're accessible. There's a number of other sessions I just wanted to highlight very quickly.

After lunch in Haight-Ashbury, there's a session that's going to be held in the next few days, and we're going to be talking about the new technology that's coming out of the new technology. We're going to be talking about the new technology that's coming out of the new technology that's coming out of the new technology. After lunch in Haight-Ashbury, there's a session 734 on H264, and it's a really, really important session. It's a pretty important technology that we're going to be adding into QuickTime.

And lastly, at 7:30 tonight, the Design Awards, where some of the world's best QuickTime content will be featured. It's a pretty exciting event tonight, so don't miss that. So without further ado, I will pass it along to Dick Huey, and we'll have him speak, and then I'll come back up and introduce Ken, and then after that we can have some questions. Thanks.

Is this on? Now it is. Great. So, Toolshed is an online marketing company. We provide a number of services to primarily an independent label and artist clientele. We do online promotion. We also do a great deal of digital licensing. On the digital licensing side, it's licensing audio and video on behalf of our label and artist clients to a wide variety of digital music services, such as iTunes. On the promotion side, it's audio and video promotion to media websites, America Online, Launch, Apple in some cases, Reel, and smaller sites as well. We also do or help coordinate webcasts. We work with developers to do those. We do pre-release album streams.

And sort of provide a new media department for hire. New media being the part of a record company that refers to the online piece. So, ToolShed was born out of the idea that independent music is too good to be relegated to the backseat with respect to the overall mix of the music that's available on the net.

And it was also born out of a conviction that technology is only good and useful within the sphere if it's wielded correctly. Sometimes it can get in the way. We try not to let that happen. I started ToolShed in 2001. This was after four years as head of new media for the Beggars Group and Matador Records.

These are two seminal independent record labels—hey, that works, look at that— who are responsible for the success of the record industry. Who are responsible for really shaping the independent music sphere in the 80s and the 90s. Bands like Bauhaus, Prodigy, Badly Drawn Boy, Pavement, Cat Power. These are household names in the independent music world. And labels such as 4AD, Beggars Banquet, 2Pure, XL Recordings are all part of this group.

When I started the new media department at Beggars, it was under the presumption that the promotional landscape would be pretty much dictated to me, and I would slot myself into it as best as I could. Now, seven years down the road, I take a different approach, which is that if there's something that I don't like, I go out and actively try to change it. And technology is helping me do that and helping Toolshed do that, which is where some of you who are developers come into the picture.

The independent music industry is an industry that's full of good intentions. It doesn't have the baggage frequently associated with the major label, corporately dictated new media departments. It does have way too few staff—staff who frequently don't have expertise in the area of online marketing. It has plenty of good ideas and too little affordable technology available to it. This is the niche that I place Toolshed into. and among our clients, besides the Vegas Group and Matador Records, we work with Touch & Go Records. This is the label that brought you Urge Overkill and, more recently, TV on the Radio and Chick Chick Chick.

and the artists. Righteous Babe Records, Ani DiFranco's label. We work with Kill Rock Stars, most recently on the Slater-Kinney record about a year and a half ago, and the Decembrists, and SpinArt and a variety of others. We also work directly with artists. Kristen Hirsch, Dan Zanes, Amy Mann are all clients of Toolshed. So our vision is to marry contacts and technology with aggregated independent music content. Let me give you some examples of how we do that.

The Toolshed brand itself we've been able to make synonymous with great independent music, and that gives us access on behalf of our independent label and artist clients. Our challenge is to take technology and make that a great partnership. Allow these little labels who don't have resources to do things they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. To give them access they wouldn't be able to have otherwise.

The Internet is a great equalizer for independent labels. Unfortunately, the mainstream methods of distribution for media, whether they be physical record distribution or radio, are almost completely controlled by the major labels' access to huge amounts of money, among other things, and/or direct control through ownership. We want to take major label technology and make it available to independents. Let me show you an example of how we're doing this. This is off the Toolshed website. It's an example of our media toolkit.

The other thing that's exciting about that is the ability for us to provide reporting. Reporting is one of the areas where we've never really, as independent labels or artists, had very good access to what happens with the music once it goes out there. You might know that a particular website gets 500,000 hits a month. You might know that your particular download was downloaded a thousand times.

You might know that or you might not. But the kinds of things that we're starting to be able to tell people are—and I'll give you a concrete example of this in a minute—we can look and see everybody that's linking to the files that we put up, many of them not people that we've gotten in touch with. Newsgroups, for instance, we get this all the time, people grabbing our tracks and putting them up on newsgroups.

So we Google them, and we Google the IP and then we include that in our report to the record label so they can see what's happening virally with their music. We're also able to—and this is the concrete example I want to give you—work with companies to determine whether the kind of music we put on a particular website was of interest. And the way we do that is by looking at how long the average download time was. So we can see what the average download time was. If we put up a 3.6 megabyte file—we did this recently with one of our content providers, Abercrombie & Fitch.

The average download time is 1.6 megabytes, which it was in that particular case. Then most of the people who are—or majority of the people who are listening to this are only downloading about 30 or 40 seconds of the song and then clicking away. This is the kind of useful information that helps us gauge where we should be putting music.

And we're actively working for ways that we can increase the kind of information that we give to people, and we're actively looking for ideas and working with developers who can develop products for us that provide us with that kind of information. Let me—every time I step over here, it gets a lot louder.

Ah, because of that. Got it. Okay, let's see. I want to now look specifically at QuickTime. We work extensively with Apple and with the promotion department at Apple, of which Glenn Bullich is a key part. And I want to show you how QuickTime is helping us level the playing field for independents. And now I'm going to go over here.

There's a QuickTime newsletter schedule that's published online by Apple. We utilize that and push for promotional album streams, which appear on Thank you. This website. We have a place up here right now. Julian Coriel is one of ours. If you were to click on any one of these, you would be taken off to the website. I'll Let's see, why don't I—should I pick the Wilco one as an example? Is that a— Let's see here. I'm not going to use this one. I'll use a different one. Let's see what this one is. Okay, so this one's going to Rhino.

And obviously Rhino is able to control the interface and what's presented. If they chose to do so, they would be able to put links to the iTunes Music Store on here, so that if somebody was listening to a full album stream on this page, they could click through and purchase the tracks.

And you can make it as beautiful as you want. Plus, you get all the traffic. So this is a really exciting thing for independent labels and artists. They've been very excited to see what we've been able to do with this. If you could switch back to the other slide now.

Go back to the other one, to the slides that I was looking at earlier? There we go. Thanks. This tool could be better. We need a very simple way to add drawers to this for things like QuickTime. If we were able to put all the assets that are needed for that QuickTime promotion that you saw in one place in a separate little area, and maybe even interface it directly with Apple's FileMaker Pro database that they use, that would be a great, useful thing for us that would cut out many emails and streamline the process.

I'm trying to throw out ideas for people and encourage you to look at these kinds of things and see where you might come into the picture. We don't want to be a developer. We support the Mac platform and we want to utilize it with—by utilizing tools—or we want to support it by utilizing tools that are developed for it that we can take to independent record labels. I'd like to show you now--

The audiovisual decks that used to come in with the slide projector on it or the film projector, that's what it was named after.

It's actually right here. AVDAC was initially just a QuickTime radio station. It is developed now in its third iteration, which I'm going to show you right now, into a very integrated commerce and promotional platform. I'd like to thank our two developer partners, Liquid Rock Studio, Michael Schaaf's here today for coming up with this alpha build, which you'll forgive us if it doesn't work completely correctly, but I think it probably will. And also Backbone Networks, who handles the radio piece of this puzzle.

So here we go. You can probably turn it down a little bit, maybe. Do I have to do that? There we go. Okay, this is actually—this player will actually interface with a database that the Beggars Group maintains, which contains all of its metadata. Everything from the actual song files themselves for every piece of music that the Beggars Group has ever put out.

To all the associated metadata—the song names, The first thing we're going to do is we're going to use the Backbone Network software to create playlists on the fly, which we're really excited about. The idea behind this was, if you're listening to something and you like it, why not be able to buy it? We'll click on the playlist button, we get this.

Which populates with the existing playlist. And from here, we can do a number of things. If we select something, we could—actually, let's pick this. Let's try the preview button. Is the preview button connected? It is. Okay. All right. Let's double-click, maybe. or maybe not. Let's try this one instead. Some of this is hooked up and some isn't. There we go.

Okay, and there we go. For that particular release, right through to the iTunes Music Store. We're really, really excited about this. The other thing that you'll be able to do from here is you'll be able to buy the CD, and this will integrate on the back end with the Beggar's Group mail order system. And many of these tracks will have video. And clicking on this pops up our video player.

This isn't our video, but it was a video that we had access to. And we've tried to incorporate some nice touches, like in terms of letting the stream fade out when the radio is playing and you switch over to video and vice versa. So that's what we have for AVDEC. We're really excited about it. It's going to launch, we hope, in a couple weeks.

And the future iteration of this, we hope, will include streaming subscription-based video, where we'd be able to develop content for this, give access to the artist in ways that we haven't really contemplated yet, and charge a monthly subscription fee. So we'd have free content, and then we'd have pay-for-play content that would give increased access of some kind.

That actually just about wraps it up for me. The two areas that I just wanted to talk real briefly about are what I would consider to be opportunities and maybe challenges. Thank you, Glenn. I think there's a couple of things I'd like to add to developers in the audience. The first one is, I guess I'd loosely title it DRM versus cross-platform compatibility.

There's I'm sure everybody's aware there are a wide variety of format wars that are on at the moment between, for instance, Windows Media and AAC. This creates problems and opportunities. Windows Media 7.3 supported WMA with DRM version 1. Windows Media 9 doesn't. This is a problem for somebody on the promotional side of things because anytime a client wants a secure download that, for instance, collects emails as part of the license procurement process, we have to use Windows Media, which cuts out our Mac users.

I'm throwing that out there to the powers that be that that's a problem for us that I would certainly love to see addressed by whoever feels capable of addressing it. And on the iTunes end, we're keen to get the ability to determine what music we've submitted to iTunes and what stage it is in terms of placement into the cart. I think any record label I've talked to is interested in that kind of thing.

There are probably a hundred other areas that we're interested in, but I think the most important thing is that we're interested in the music that we're playing. Yeah. And I think that's the kind of thing that I would love to talk to you individually about, and I will. I'll be around afterwards. I'm going to turn it over now to Ken Waagner. And thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Dick. So, you know, it seems like there's a good start here. You know, there's a whole sort of big leveling effect happening for independent artists, and we're seeing not only companies like Toolshed and others provide new media marketing for independent labels, plenty of websites that are available out there that are genre-specific, so it's not all about Clear Channel and radio and MTV anymore. So there's a lot of opportunities, and we're seeing that sort of really start to blossom and grow.

With that, there's sort of a whole bunch of new challenges and things that we need to address, and clearly the sort of movement by lots and lots of companies towards standards and choice and differentiation in a competitive marketplace based on standards allows a lot of folks to, you know, use different tools and choose tools that are based on these standards and apply them interoperably out there. If you're interested in internet radio and specifically the product Backbone Networks has created, and it is tremendous.

It's a complete internet radio set up in a box with all the reporting that's necessary for really generating a complete and robust internet radio in a box solution. That session is 725. It's 2 o'clock on Friday in Haight-Ashbury. So our next speaker, Ken Waagner, I've known for quite a while, and, you know, as far as success stories go and probably some of the most interesting anecdotes and performance on what's happened, I'm sure you've heard of the beginning of the sort of peer-to-peer decline of major labels, the effect that had on the non-A-list bands or whatever, and some of the initiative and some of the tools that bands like Wilco through Ken Waagner have taken have kind of dispelled a lot of the myths about, you know, what the web can or doesn't do for bands and how it works. So I won't steal any of Ken's thunder. I'll introduce him, and here you go.

Okay, my name is Ken Waagner. I have a company called Smartly Done Solutions, and I started Smartly Done in 1999 as I was putting my record company out of business, and then have set out to try to put every other record company out of business in the process. I'm just kind of kidding, but... Anyhow, I had an independent label from 1994 to 1999 called Hit It Recordings.

Put out 25 records with varying success, and through the whole process, tried to take advantage of as much Internet opportunity as there was out there, because coming from an independent label background—I've been in the independent record business my entire life, about 20 years—I was always faced with the idea that I was going to be able to do something that was going to be a little bit different than what I was going to be able to do.

wall of available opportunity because of the limits of just resources, really. Trying to get on the radio, trying to get on TV, trying to get in the press, everything like that. And I just really saw the Internet as an opportunity to reach an audience, and especially a direct audience.

If somebody was interested in my band or in my label, they could come directly to me and I could give them the content instead of spending all my money and all my resources trying to get it out there and hoping that someone would hear it, hoping someone would not resell it in a record store or whatever.

And so with what I really started Smartly Done To Do was to really help bands and help independent record companies and independent businesses reach their audience more effectively via the web. And one of my first clients ironically ended up being this band Wilco, which I'm not sure if all of you are familiar with, but they're a band from Chicago who had at the time, for three records out on Reprise Records and grew out of the band Uncle Tupelo.

And around the time that I started working with them, they had their third record out on Reprise and had just delivered a live record to Warner Brothers that Warner Brothers had said that they didn't think it was the right time for the band to release a live record.

So I started working with the band to try to help them find a way to put the record out online. This was back in the boom of '99, 2000, so there were great opportunities out there, but then as the AOL/Time Warner merger happened, moratorium got put on anything, so we ended up having to shelve the live record.

And then, I think it was in the early '90s, I think it was in Right after that all kind of went down, we started to shift focus to setting up the band's new record, which was this album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And I'll kind of go through the story and talk to you about the process of that record and then leading up to the new record, which just came out last Tuesday.

So if you can go to computer three here.

First thing is we're prominently featured, and I would chalk our success in the iTunes Music Store, as Glenn said, we're the number one record in iTunes right now. The record's been out for a week. And again, as Dick was saying, being featured on the... Being featured on the QuickTime site has proven to be of massive promotional value to us, both in the QuickTime newsletter that goes out every other week on Fridays and on the site. It just drives massive traffic to our site, has crashed our server a couple times, and it again goes directly to the destination.

What we did here is, again, we ended up with the dilemma, but we figured it was going to happen. It was inevitable. The record leaked onto the network, onto P2P. In the end of March, beginning of April, the record was originally slated to come out in June. We had already built, based on the success of the first record, we had already planned on doing the preview of the second record, but as soon as it leaked on P2P, our grandiose plan of building a player got bum-rushed into three days of work, which I couldn't have done again without the help of Michael Schaff over there. So this is just a—that's not it. That's later.

This is a full album preview, which is launching multiple times because I keep clicking on stuff. Oh, no, it's not waiting here. It's slightly easier if you look down at the screen. So this is—we did three rates on this. We did a 56, a 100 kilobit, and a 300 kilobit stream to give people the full stereo experience. And again, we allowed people to kind of track through the record song by song and really preview the record and satisfy their curiosity.

I personally don't believe that there's anything to fear about letting people hear your music online. And I think that I've been befuddled by the record company's approach for the last ten years that they've fought this opportunity when they spend millions of dollars on radio promotion and hundreds of thousands of dollars on videos to try to get their music heard by people, and then they have this golden opportunity to put their music in front of people and they constantly fight it.

And you have this thing where you've got this new media department at one end of the hall spending thousands of dollars trying to get the records played, and you've got the lawyers at the other end of the hall spending millions of dollars to stop people from hearing them, and it just seems to not be a really good business model. I think I could probably answer why they're having some problems, but anyhow.

So this is the skin player that we did for the record, and it's been up since April, beginning of April, leading up to the record coming out last week. I don't have all the numbers on the record right now, but they're estimating that we're going to do somewhere between 80 and 90 thousand copies first week out, and definitely going to debut top ten with the record.

I'd say thank you, but it had nothing to do with me. But I'll thank you on behalf of the band. So that's the player. From the site, we kind of do the same thing, where we just really make it available to people. Again, I grew up in an era where my whole awareness of bands came from finding out about bands and reading the papers and reading magazines and finding out about bands and going to the record store and dropping $20 or $30 on every import record and just really doing it. Again, just from the opportunity out here where it's like you've got somebody's curiosity and they come, I think the thing that makes the most sense is to make it as easy as possible for them to hear your music.

And I really have found QuickTime to just really deliver on that. So that's, again, why we use it and why I think we've had so much success. So some of the things that we did with the Wilco site, as I was talking about the movie before, Um... There was this movie, we included the trailer in the enhanced CD content for the first Wilco, for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but as we were finishing the enhanced content, excuse me, the trailer wasn't ready for the movie yet.

So we did include some content. We had a four or five minute clip of the band playing a song live that we included on the CD itself, but then we brought people off the site to the trailer for the film. And this way we were kind of able to like update the content and maintain the content.

I had grander ambitions, but I also had three days to develop the enhanced content for the CD, so I didn't really make everything that I wanted to happen on this record. But again, just the ability, the ease of... of embedding the video in the website and everything just was a no-brainer.

And so it was very easy to do and very effective. The movie ended up doing really well, both on DVD and in the theaters, and was quite successful. Now, the other thing that I was talking about having done with these guys is that we've been doing a lot of live webcasts.

Originally, when I first started doing them, we were just doing a really basic embedding the player in a page, promoting it off the site, and just trying to get people to come. And we did a couple of them really just to kind of test the waters. I think we may have been one of the—probably the first band to really do a webcast using Broadcaster and stuff, Glenn, I think, yeah.

So we just really jumped on it first. Again, I worked with this company, and we had done 1,500 live shows and live DJ sets, all available online. And a lot of them we had done as live content, and I was really enamored with that whole process. And once I saw QuickTime Broadcaster, I was just like, I'm in. So since then, we've worked—since, I guess, the first one we did was September of 2002, and we've just kind of continued to refine that process.

And after we had done a couple of Wilco ones, Wilco went on tour with REM last fall, and we kind of pitched REM about doing some webcasts from their tour. And they were into the idea, and we ended up getting to work with Warner Brothers and working with REM to do this player for REM's last tour. And what we did is we kind of pitched them on really building it as a promotional device. They had this Greatest Hits record coming.

And they had this Greatest Hits tour that they were doing where they were—the band don't really go out and play their—I'm going to just pause it for a second. The band don't really go out and play their hits all the time, and they've got this vast library of hits that they've built over their 20-year career. And as they were going to go out and do this tour, we kind of pitched them on the idea of doing a player that was basically—the Ref movie is only 144K.

Or is it smaller, Michael? I saw you shake your head. So the concept being that this is a completely viral item that was able to be provided to radio stations and to be popped off the Warner Brothers site, popped off the REM site. And all of the content we were able to update dynamically. And it's essentially an emailable website, really, if you look at it.

What they wanted to do was they wanted to— not only promote themselves, but they wanted to promote the other bands that were on the tour. Over the four legs of the tour, they took four different bands. And what we did is we built in bio information for each of the bands that were on the tour. And then in addition, we built this little jukebox.

Which is going to show 404 because we killed the content, but what this was was just a sampler of all the bands on the tour, and again, this was up. The plan when we originally did the pitch, again, was 90 days out, and we got a green light eight days before the first show. But the plan was to offer fans an opportunity to hear not only R.E.M. and some of the songs from the forthcoming Greatest Hits album, but to also show people the other bands that are on the tour.

I believe the dates, Yeah, this was the whole tour here. And again, we pitched them originally, we were going to build ticketing and everything into it, but just due to development time, we didn't have the opportunity. But again, you kind of see how the whole thing is really a website, basically, that was able to kind of be put out there.

Then what we did was, this was the first time that we, having worked with streaming video and webcasting video, despite the fact that I had a TS3 in Missoula and I could have done full-frame video, I didn't have source content. So on the previous tour, REM had carried a three-camera crew and were doing video on Jumbotrons and everything like that, so the original pitch was to do video content. But since there was no video content, we came up with the idea of doing live images and shooting photos. During the show, to kind of give people a visual experience with no video.

And Michael helped us build this player, which when we first told the QuickTime guys that we wanted to do it, they were like, "You want a what?" But we ultimately ended up pulling it off, and I might ask Michael to step up here for a second and tell me how we did it, since I have no idea. But anyhow, what we did is the live element.

The full two-hour show streamed live. We did two shows from the tour. We did Missoula, Montana, and we did Toronto, Canada. It's the full recording, and the band gave us unlimited access. Normally, when you're shooting a big band, they'll limit you to shooting three songs because after that they get all sweaty and they don't want anyone to see them.

But they gave us unlimited access. We were able to go anywhere on the stage, and we shot the entire time. We were dumping the picture. We basically had three power books set up. We had one power book on stage at the monitor position and two power books at front of house, one doing audio and one doing images.

And we did—what we were doing was shooting the images digitally, dumping them into iPhoto, selecting them really quick, batching them, and then I was putting them from the stage back to my partner at front of house, who was in turn putting them onto the server and updating the script. All the images are all served from an XML file, so we're able to update the script on the fly and add new photos. So as you're watching the show occur and as the time's elapsing, the photos are constantly fresh and kind of keep you in the loop.

We have the ability to control the transitions, how long the photos display, how long the transitions take, and all the transition, you know, if it's a wipe or a fade or anything like that. So this worked pretty well. And then what we did is we did the live event and then in turn just turned it around right away, edited the photos, and put the live stream up on demand. And the band used it, Warner's used it, to really kind of like let people hear the band and let people like see what the tour was like. So that's the REM player.

From there, we We crossed over with the Wilco tour—well, actually, not even with the tour, but with this new record, again, due to development time, which always seems to be the trouble here. And it's like I always put these things out there so far in advance. I put this pitch out there in February and basically got the green light on June 7th for a record that was coming out June 22nd.

So we had 15 days to really kind of pull the whole thing together. And I came up with the brilliant idea that—well, the band changed members. The band added two new members right before the—right as they finished recording this record. And what we really wanted to do was to kind of satisfy people's curiosity that the new lineup was going to be up to snuff and let people hear it. And then also, again, because of the record that had been on P2P, we were looking for a way to add value.

And so what we did is we allowed ourselves the ability to update the content. So on the actual disc itself is only a ref movie that comes to the server and gets whatever content that we give them. So by doing that, we were able to record the band's show in their hometown Chicago on June 12th and have the archive of the show and photos all built into a player and available to anyone that bought the record. So in essence, buying the new studio album, you basically get a free live record that goes with it.

And as the band are just in the process—they're in Europe right now touring. They'll be back in the States touring all for the next year or so, starting in the fall. And what we really wanted to do was kind of satisfy people's curiosity. So we built this player that— Well, here we go. This is sort of an image of the disc.

This is the front end that you get from the disc, and it just tells you that you need QuickTime, and then it tells you to click through to get the content. Once you click through, we built in this really nifty little thing that kind of comes back and looks to verify that the person's got the CD in their computer, and then gives them the enhanced content. If they move the movie off of the disc and they try to do it, it will look back. It won't see the file on the disc, and it won't give them the enhanced content. It will basically lock them out.

Now, we did have one minor problem, which is a good one to watch out for, but the plant actually took the liberties of adding a space to the end of our directory. So, on Tuesday morning after the midnight sale, the record went on sale, and I woke up to 71 emails from people saying, "Your content says that I need to have the CD in my computer." And I said, "Well, I don't have the CD in my drive, and the CD's in my drive, and it's telling me I don't have the CD." And so, the other thing was that neither Michael or I had received a copy of the actual CD for testing due to our limited development time.

But within an hour or so, we were able to figure out, Michael was able to figure out the issue was that they added the space, and we were again able to fix the content on the server side and solve the issue. So, that's the first thing. Now, from there, the person clicks through, and they're given this player here.

If I can remember the URL of it, but I think this is it. Yeah. So this was a destination page from the player. And what we did, because we didn't have any sort of like sophisticated check back system, we did something really simple, which was we asked people to enter a five-digit code, and the five-digit code was the barcode number off the back of the CD.

And if you had that code, then it allowed you access to the download of the song. You could get the player and hear the stream, but you couldn't get to the download section without, in theory, entering the thing. One of the really neat things about Wilco is just that they've been very generous with their content.

They just see this as a great opportunity, and they've been really amazing about just giving it to the fans. They spend a good amount of money giving content to their fans, and we've really seen the returns. And I think that's one of the things that we've done. We've done a lot of things on it.

Prior to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot coming out, the highest the band had ever been in the Billboard charts was number 70. The most records the band had sold was 220,000. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's at 470,000 copies sold right now. And this record, like I said, has done somewhere around 80,000 or 90,000 copies in its first week out. So what we did here was we did the free EP, three covers. You could download the cover. We did PDFs of the cover so fans could print them out.

And basically make their own bonus CD, and we just gave it to people in exchange for buying the record. And that's really the kind of stuff we've done to try to, again, use QuickTime as much as we can, because, again, I just really love it. And we've had a really great working relationship with Glenn and the team support from me calling him on three days' notice and telling him I'm going to be doing a webcast from the moon to just me getting killed bandwidth-wise and them helping out. It's just been a great working relationship, and I think that pretty much covers it. So I'll be happy to answer your questions. I'll be around all week, so if anybody wants to talk.