Plumb Designs Sony Music Licensing Site.
While the industry remains in the early stages of determining a standard for music distribution over the Internet, New York-based Sony Music Entertainment has launched a Website that seeks to use both the Internet and Sony’s repertoire of music. The site, www.sonymusic.com/ licensing, is an online database that is designed for advertising, television, and feature film creatives who are searching for music.
"There wasn’t really anything out there that made it easy for the trade under extreme time pressure to find the right music for the right usage that they needed," contended J. David Waldman, VP new technology and business development for Sony Music Entertainment. "This is really a business-to-business application primarily for the trades of film, TV, and advertising agencies to use our music in a commercial context." Once users log onto the site, they are presented with an interface that enables them to search Sony’s database of music by subject, artist, album, and track. Users can create their own virtual workspace to put songs aside which they might be interested in using, and they can contact Sony’s licensing representatives via email (or telephone) to determine the specifics about a song’s availability. Sony claims a library of over 200,000 songs with a range of genres drawn from the various Sony labels, which include Sony Classical, Columbia, and Epic.
Thinkmap
The site, dubbed "The Sony Music Licensing Site," has a simple and elegant design which uses Thinkmap, a Java-based proprietary technology developed by New York-based Plumb Design, which was responsible for the overall design of the site. The Thinkmap interface transforms raw data into a visual architecture that looks like an Alexander Calder-style mobile made of circles (Calder was an American-born artist who was well-known for creating mobiles). Each circle represents an interrelated subject, and the size of the circle provides a relative sense of how many songs are in that category. Clicking on one circle brings up another set of interrelated subjects. Performing a subject search for "God," for instance, brings up a list of 66 songs as well as a Thinkmap showing the relation of "God" (a large circle) to nine other related subjects ("faith" is a smaller circle).
Michael Freedman, director of business development and principal at Plumb, explained that Thinkmap represents an evolution in database design. "We think of Thinkmap as a paradigm shift in interfaces in the sense that we’ve moved from traditional interfaces connected with buttons to one where the data themselves become the means of navigation."
The information listed for each song includes publisher and the release date, information that Waldman said would help advertisers efficiently research the music they might use for spots. The entire database consists of information from Sony as well as from Jeff Green’s Green Book, a thematic guide to popular music.
Sony makes some audio clips of the site’s titles available so interested parties can listen to a portion of prospective tracks. Waldman said that about 25% of the songs on the site have clips though a perusal of the site seems to suggest that the current percentage is actually lower. More clips are continually being added, though not all of the titles will have a clip on the site. Waldman said Sony hopes to make it possible for end users to download music from the site to determine if the track fits. "That’s one of our goals for phase two, is to be able-in a secure environment-to give them the ability to electronically download the music so they can burn it onto whatever trial medium they have," he said. He also noted that Sony would like to add additional search capabilities to the site, such as being able to search by criteria such as tempo and lyrics.
Plumb was chosen for the project following a lengthy selection process after which they ended up on a short list for Sony’s future development projects. Plumb had previously completed online projects for The Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic and Bacardi.
