I have recently been given the opportunity to interview (via email) the Chairman and COO of YANGAROO, Inc. YANGAROO is a provider of a product called DMDS (Digital Media Distribution System) which caters to the music industry and provides artists and corporations a digitally secure method to transfer and distribute media to various organizations. They have recently been involved with the Juno Awards, using their DMDS product, to aid the artists in their distribution of their work(s) to the judges.

The interview is below. Feel free to let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

1. Me: Can you please explain what Yangaroo is and what are its main products and/or solutions?

Cliff Hunt: YANGAROO Inc is a publicly traded technology company based in Toronto with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London UK. Its main product is its patented Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS) which is the leading secure B2B digital delivery solution for the music and advertising industries. DMDS is a web-based delivery system that pioneers secure digital file distribution by incorporating biometrics, encryption and watermarking. DMDS replaces the physical distribution of musical recordings and advertising to radio, media, retailers and other authorized recipients with more accountable, effective and far less costly digital delivery of broadcast quality media via the Internet. Other products that YANGAROO has developed include eNotes which are used extensively by the music industry in both Canada and the US. These are special notifications that not only deliver the music track, but also provide additional information and graphics, and allow the recipient to stream the music directly from the notification. DMDSDirect is another  product designed to service the growing independent community, allowing independent labels and artists to send their music to radio formats that have been pre-packaged ,( ie top 100 College radio stations, or top 100 Alternative Rock stations, etc), and with the added convenience of payment made simply by credit card.

2. Me: What is your personal background?

Cliff Hunt: I started as a musician, playing in a horn band called the Brass Union in the Toronto area.  After my band broke up, I was hired by Coca-Cola promoting live concerts,  and from there was hired as an agent at the biggest booking agency in Canada. That’s not what I ultimately wanted to do, but I learned a lot. As an agent, a number of artists asked me if I’d be interested in managing them, so I did that for a number of years. From there I formed my own record production and music publishing companies, and over 25 years signed over 35 major international record deals with  my artists achieving international success, and winning numerous Juno Awards and touring the world. I guess I saw the changes in the record industry coming in the late 90’s and saw the digital age as a new and exciting opportunity within the industry that I knew best, and YANGAROO evolved from that process.

3. Me: What is DMDS and how does it work?

Cliff Hunt: The record company has the DMDS agent on their desktop computer or laptop. They upload the file from whatever digital format they have it in. They first put in the metadata. They can add cover art, photos, tour dates, a link to the video and all kinds of additional information. They choose the destinations. They can choose all of hot AC radio, for instance, or can cherry-pick stations or choose individuals within those stations. Then they choose the date they want it to be downloaded or they can have it downloaded immediately. Radio receives it and can stream it, listen to it, and if it’s something they want to add to their playlist, they just click download for a full WAV, CD-quality file. They drop it into their scheduling system and it’s on the air.

4. Me: How did you get involved with the Juno awards and how will Yangaroo be able to help it?

Cliff Hunt: It’s interesting, actually , it was CARAS (Canadian Association of Recording Arts and Sciences) that contacted us. DMDS is used exclusively by all four major label groups in Canada, those being Universal , Warner, SonyBMG, and EMI and the presidents of these for groups sit on the board of CARAS, and when it came time for CARAS to seek a new way of handling the voting process,  we were the obvious choice.

5. Me: I’ve reviewed your website and noticed a references to musicrypt. What is musicrypt?

Cliff Hunt: Musicrypt was the original name of the company, and as were focused originally on the music industry and would be encrypting the files the name seemed obvious at the time. As we began to see the potential for our technology to provide opportunities far beyond just the delivery of music files we realized a name change was necessary and changed the corporate name to YANGAROO Inc. about 18 months ago.

6. Me: How will DMDS and Yangaroo benefit the music industry as a whole?

Cliff Hunt: We benefit the music industry in many ways. We save them money, we save them time, we provide much more flexibility, accountability, security, and we are environmentally safe. Consider the traditional way of sending music to radio for instance. Special CD-pros have to be manufactured, they must be packaged, then labeled, and then delivered to hundreds or thousands of radio stations throughout North America. This costs a fortune, is inefficient, and wastes literally tons of non-biodegradable materials, not to mention, the burning jet and diesel fuel to deliver this content. This process can also take weeks to accomplish.  As you have seen above we replace this entire, add additional value to the process and do it in minutes.

The music industry must become much more effective and efficient and DMDS helps them accomplish this.

7. Me: How will DMDS and Yangaroo benefit the individual artists?

Cliff Hunt: As I described above, DMDSDirect is a tool designed to help individual artists and small independent labels. Our radio packages allow them to send to radio stations quickly and inexpensively, and get many of the same benefits as the major labels . The cost saving is considerable and this allows the independent artist or label to spend more money on advertising and promoting themselves.

8. Me: What do you envision for the future of Yangaroo?

Cliff Hunt: YANGAROO will expand far beyond just the music industry. We are already beginning to deliver radio spots for the advertising industry and we expect in the next short while to be able to deliver video files, meaning broadcast quality music videos and television commercials in the same manner and with the same features that we now provide for audio delivery. YANGAROO delivers digital content from point A to point B quickly, securely, and inexpensively. That could be a music file, a video file, a print document, or a medical x-ray. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

9. Me: Are there any other upcoming projects or partnerships that you can talk about? If so what are they and who will they benefit?

Cliff Hunt: The major project we are consumed with currently is the launch of our DMDS 5.0. This is a complete new version of our DMDS software that is a quantum leap forward and much more advanced than the current version, providing for the previously mentioned video delivery, much more detailed and visually enhanced reporting, and many more features that will allow YANGAROO to remain the world leader in this new and growing industry. We expect to launch DMDS 5.0 by year-end.

10. Me: As a closing comment could you please talk about your views and impression of the state of the music industry in Canada. What do you think needs to be done to improve the revenues of the corporations and artists involved and what do you feel needs to be done to slow down or stop the piracy of digital media.

Cliff Hunt: I am more optimistic about the music industry in Canada than I am say in the US. The major labels in Canada led the way and were the first music industry in any country in the world to make the transition to entire digital delivery for promotional music. They did it using DMDS and have been using us exclusively since 2004. The independent sector in this country has also embraced DMDS and is following the lead of the major labels, making themselves more viable by saving significant  time and money.

The rest of the world is moving to a digital world, but it is taking more time. We expect to do over 2 million deliveries in the US this year and have more than 2000 US radio stations registered on DMDS and receiving much of their content through us.

The recent announcement of Federal Elections to be held on October 14 has prompted me to start blogging about the political shenanegans of our fine nation so I’ve created a blog located at canadianpolitics.today.com. This way I am able to keep the political ranting off of this site which is still intended to be my tech/business blog.

I’ve decided it’s time to move on so I’ve decided to put saveload.org up for sale.

Why am I selling it? I don’t really have time to update it each and every day like it needs to be and I’ve got a couple other ventures in the making that will be better for the pocket book .

I’ve started a thread on digitalpoint for the sale. If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them here or contact me via a digitalpoint PM.

Cheers!
~TheNerd

I decided to change the site over to Wordpress. I was using Joomla, it’s a great CMS, but it was lacking some of the basic stuff I wanted. Mainly what was missing was a plugin to autogenerate the XML sitemap needed for Google, Live.com, and Yahoo!.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do with the template and plugins so it will likely be a couple of days before things return to normal but after that I’ll be posting more regularly than before.

Cheers for now!
~TheNerd