Let's be honest. Getting a shiny CD in the mail is much different than getting an email invitation to download an album. And with differences and change, comes hesitation. I've got 9 years of experience being on the promo-receiving end of the spectrum with another venture I'm involved with. I not only understand the process, but also the psychology behind all of this. Although record labels comprise most of our "paying customers," we consider those labels' media contacts as our customers too. The team here at Haulix put quite a bit of thought into the media contact experience. We analyzed what's "out there" now with other digital services and determined some flaws.

One process flaw we set out to cure, is getting media contacts to the secure promo as easy as possible. These great people, who invest a lot of time writing about new music releases are already hesitant to digital downloads. They are used to receiving CDs in the mail, and now they have to register for multiple accounts with a digital service, remember multiple username/password combinations and constantly login to get at the promos?! To them, that's like moving backwards in a way.

Here at Haulix, you import your media contacts. The first time you send out an email invitation to a contact, they click a custom link in the invitation that brings them here. The Haulix system is smart enough to automatically register that contact if they don't have an account. If they do have an account, we sign them in automatically. To them, the registration and login processes are transparent!

Another flaw we set out to cure, is the fact that many media contacts in a certain genre of music, get invitations from multiple labels in that same genre who use the same digital service. We came up with a way to centralize a media contact's promos from all labels that use our service. When a media contact signs in, each record label that has them as a contact, is represented up top of the page with their own tab. When a contact clicks a tab, that label's promos appear. This strategy is transparent to our record label customers and all of their account settings and promo material are separate and secure, yet the media contact gets a much better overall experience having all promos in one place.

As the music industry evolves, we all have to adapt to the changes. We know this can be very difficult at times. At Haulix, we strive to make the entire pre-release promo distribution process as painless as possible for our customers and their associated contacts.

This question was posted in the Independent Record Labels Association (IRLA) LinkedIn group by a record label President about a month ago and I've received quite a few positive responses via private email from people who were interested in what I had to say. Being that the group is private, I'll share my response here.

When the Compact Disc Disappears from the Marketplace, What are You Going To Do?

I think just the fact that you and many other labels are accepting the fact that there is a major shift in the industry, moving towards "digital everything," is a good thing, in that you want to, and plan on, being prepared for it. Sprinkle the bad economy on top of all of this and it's obvious that there has to be a major strategy change.

I would imagine with iTunes, Amazon.com and the million other digital music stores, that the standards will continue to tighten up and all stakeholders will be happy as they continue to get their cut from the sale of each song. Profits from a digital song purchase aren't as high as selling a compact disc, but if you go all digital, you don't have the overhead of manufacturing the discs.

One area of expertise that I have, is in the marketing/digital promo part of the strategy. Labels, who are used to mailing out mass numbers of discs to various media outlets (radio, webzines, newspapers, magazines, etc.) could cut costs and save quite a bit of money, if they adopted using a digital promo service. (You pay a subscription, upload one copy of your promo into the system and then invite contacts to download and listen, so they can write their reviews and articles.) This service is less expensive than hiring an in house programmer or consultant to build your own. Plus, with watermarking technologies, you can decrease leaking. And then there is tracking. There's nothing fun about mailing discs out and then wondering if the recipient got them and when/if they will write about the album. Digital service has fine grained tracking so you can be more efficient.

Let's embrace the fact that music is going digital. Compact discs aren't gone yet, but you can certainly get a head start by serving your promos in digital format.

We use quite a few HttpHandlers in the Haulix codebase. If you are running in IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline Mode, then registering your handler is trivial. In the web.config file, find the system.webServer node and add a line to the handlers section.

<handlers>
      <add name="SampleHandler" verb="*"
        path="SampleHandler.new"
        type="SampleHandler, SampleHandlerAssembly"
        resourceType="Unspecified" />
    </handlers>

I had a situation in a different website where I was running in IIS 7 Classic Mode. Registering a handler requires a few more steps. Most of the HttpHandler articles I found online referenced using the .ashx extension and the WebHandler directive, which can be called directly without having to setup the web.config or IIS file extension mappings. So, I hope this will help others who have had a hard time finding the solution. For this to work, you have to define both an httpHandlers element AND a handlers element in the web.config.  The lines in red are important and are what threw me off the first time.

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb="*" path="SampleHandler.new"
        type="SampleHandler, SampleHandlerAssembly" />
    </httpHandlers>
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
      <add name=SampleHandler" verb="*" path="SampleHandler.new"
      Modules="IsapiModule"
      scriptProcessor="C:Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll"
      resourceType="File" />
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Here is a great article written by Carolyn Pritchard.

Even though our service is targeted at pre-release promos, this article talks about CD's in general.

She says, "CDs and DVDs are made from materials including polycarbonate plastic, petroleum-based lacquer and paints, aluminum and other metals. These materials release chemicals that contribute to environmental and health problems as well as global warming, both when they are produced and when they are destroyed."

and later continues, "Eliminating the physical distribution of digital goods is an excellent way for companies in many industries to reduce their impact on the environment. The impact is twofold; locally (smog, landfill, etc.) and globally (green house gas emissions)."

Read more here: http://earth2tech.com/2007/08/16/how-the-physical-distribution-of-digital-goods-impacts-the-environment/

Plan Calculator
Need help deciding which of our plans is best for you? We would like to introduce our new Plan Calculator.

Simply answer a few questions:

How many media contacts will you send invitations to each month?
How many promos will you create each month?
How long will your promos be active?
How many tracks per promo?
What is the average length of each track?
What bitrate is used for your MP3's?

Not only will we compute which of our plans is best for you, but we also compute approximately how much money you would save each month versus mailing out physical promos.


Reporting

Our customers have requested and we have listened! Now you can run reports on download counts per each of your media contacts and activities.  Want to see a report listing all of the "Sign In" activities? How about a report listing "All" activities performed last week? All of this and more can be done with Haulix reports. And best of all, you can export your reports in PDF, CSV, Word and Excel flavors. We plan on adding more reports as time goes on and a need is shown for them.