Rock Is Religion spoke with Toronto-based, Yangaroo’s CEO John Heaven about its patented Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS), a secure B2B digital delivery solution for the music and advertising industries. DMDS replaces the physical distribution of audio and video content for music, music videos, and advertising to television, radio, media, retailers and other authorized recipients with more accountable, effective, and far less costly digital delivery of broadcast quality media via the Internet.

Record labels originally know Yangaroo as Musicrypt, before the company changed its name in hopes to generate a broader reach into new markets (television, advertising distribution and film and television production support).

RIR: How does Yangaroo’s technology allow record labels to send their artists’ music directly to radio station personnel over the Internet in broadcast-quality format?

JH: Record labels upload their artists’ broadcast-quality music and music videos and select destinations, which can be radio-station personnel and even television personnel for music videos.  The intended recipients are notified of the files availability and can download them directly into their equipment on site for review and for later broadcast. Music files are protected by biopassword authentication of users, digital watermarking, secure file encryption, and access rights management to prevent piracy.

RIR: Is this a free service?

JH: Receiving broadcast-quality audio and video files via DMDS is free and rates for customers vary according to volume.

RIR: Yangaroo’s tagline is “Better… Faster… Greener” -how so?

JH: DMDS eliminates the environmentally unfriendly and costly practices of producing physical media such as beta tapes or CD’s and printed promotional materials, and shipping them by truck or plane to their intended destinations.  It has been estimated, for example, that per each CD produced and packaged with promotional information about an artist, .7 pounds of fossil fuel are consumed.

RIR: How does this system mutually benefit both the labels and broadcasters?

JH: This system benefits both labels and broadcasters in many ways.  It’s secure, it’s quick, it saves them money, and it allows labels to instantly gauge the interest in their artists’ songs as they can track content accessed from DMDS.

RIR: What made you design this technology?

JH: Our team’s background in the music industry made us realize that the Internet could be used to the benefit of the industry for distributing and receiving music securely, quickly, and cost effectively.  We first went about devising a means to make it more secure, which resulted in our Biometrics Rights Management System, a patented method that combines biometrics with encryption and web-based distribution.  Content owners and distributors with whom we had relationships were quick to adopt this technology not long after we began making it available in 2003.

RIR: Is Yangaroo the only service broadcasters/labels use to send music?

JH: Yangaroo is the proven leader in this field, having first developed DMDS and then, just this past year, enhancing it to provide labels with the ability to transmit television broadcast-quality video files.  We completed our first successful tests of video delivery in the fall, the first video deliveries ever to broadcasters in the U.S. and Canada.

RIR: What are Yangaroo’s plans for 2010?

JH: We will be expanding our television broadcast quality content distribution for television advertising, music videos, award shows and film and TV program production support. This will complement our continuing growth for audio content delivery for record labels, artists and award shows such as the Grammys.

Earlier this month, Facebook began the Beta roll out of a new currency system called Facebook Credits. The feature allows users to purchase credits to reward their friends for posting good status updates at the rate of $1 USD for 100 credits. Currently, the system is in Beta mode, and is only available at select colleges only.

Sounds innocent enough: your friend posts a cool status update - you reward them with credit.

However what this means to brands is, if Facebook Credits take off, brands will soon be able to offer their “influential friends” a reward for mentioning their product to a highly attractive demographic (the fastest growing demographic on Facebook being 35).

For record labels and artists promoting their new release or upcoming tours, a “pay per play” strategy can be applied too -but for a price far lower than a traditional ad-buy.

Even though there are no hard statistics on exactly how much influence a status update has on the consumer buying power, we all know from personal usage, how effective music mentions and recommendations can be when we see our own friends make a mention of a band or song on their own updates

Now all brands need is to find the right friends who would be enough of a Fan to actually do it.