Chris Parr The Digital Era

It’s a digital revolution. It’s changing the business model for the record labels, and, thus, because we are very much connected to that because, obviously, the record labels and the artists are a big part of our business, a huge constituency. I think it’s just a transition. Everybody’s trying to figure out what the new paradigm is, and we’re very interested. We’ve actually – MTV Networks, which would represent CMT and MTV and VH1, to name a few; we have a new digital music initiative that we’re coming up with a very much iTunes-type of offering, and what we’re trying to do is create a little bit more – a little less kind of tactical – if you look at some of the digital music services out there right now, they’re very kind of black and white. You’re just moving tracks around. There’s really not much of an experience to them.

We believe there’s a better – as music lovers, we think there’s a real opportunity to kind of get back to a little bit of the principles of people lamented the demise of the vinyl and the album covers and how you could sit and look at the great artwork and the information, and it’s kind of not quite the same experience with a CD booklet that’s this big, and that’s been something that I think people have talked about a lot through the CD revolution.

And now, we’re getting this digital form, and it’s like; wow, it’s updateable; you can keep it current; you can – it’s like you can put tour links on there when you go down the road and turn them off when you’re not, and it’s so dynamic, and so what we want to do is have an immersive kind of experience, where you can go in there and you can – and you’re not just downloading tracks and you go back to your emails or whatever else you were doing. It’s like it kind of becomes more of a; I wanna go in there, and then, all of the sudden, I’m learning about this band, and; oh, wow, that artist that I love; here’s three bands that they say they love, and maybe I should go find – maybe I should figure out what those guys are about. I’ve never heard of them.

So it’s really kind of that immersive idea. You’re still getting your music. It’s downloading in the background, and you get your tracks, but we just think there’s a better experience there, so you’re gonna see that in the very near future. The digital world is a huge impact; I mean, just the feedback loop that we have from our audience through our dot com world. We offer our videos, our music videos, the artist music videos. It’s just another screen for them to see it on is the way we look at it.

We were, I think, very progressive about that. We’ve been streaming music videos on CMT.com, in particular, for many years. It’s just if people wanna see it that way, if that’s the way they choose to interact with the CMT brand, we’re gonna do it in a television linear fashion, as we call it, or we’re gonna do it online, and then we’ve got new screens because you’ve got such great technology happening with telephones. We have partnerships right now with some key – Verizon. I think we just announced one with Sprint, some of the major telephone operators, cell phone operators, where you can stream things onto your phone, the new handhelds. The next generation of phones are gonna have video capability, so you can stream in information.

Well, it makes sense, and we put out already and have been for months, maybe even a year now; we send out a CMT news update, where you can get the information. It’s a little soundbyte. It’s about 90 seconds. We have that. We might have a performance from our online series that we have. It’s a performance series called Studio 330, and we excerpt a minute of that or a minute and a half of that, and we put it on and we can stream it to peoples’ phones.

Right now, there’s only a few hundred thousand users or endusers, subscribers, but it’s just a matter of time as people upgrade their phones and update their phones whether they’ll be able to get it on the go, and so there’s another use of the digital world and how we’re moving our content around to multiple screens. We have a multi-platform strategy for CMT and for all of our sister channels as well.

The users of Internet or dot com, CMT.com; it’s actually very surprising, and I think it actually, when we first launched CMT.com, I guess it’s five or six years ago; it was probably right around the year 2000; probably earlier than that; actually, probably ’98, ’99. We were out there, and it really, actually helped dispel some of the myths about who’s watching this thing called Country Music Television, and, at the time, we were in about 40, 45 million homes, so we were trying to grow our subscribe base through the cable operators and having that information and showing who was using it.

And you had a myriad of users, and a lot of professionals – the income levels are typically higher than average. They’re very much consumers. They are – it’s very likely to be a family. They have children; they have mortgages; they have cars. It’s like it’s in that – on average, we’re somewhere in the mid 30-to-40-year-old demographic. It’s kind of our median age, if you will. It fluctuates a little bit here and there, but if you had to put a number on it, it’s probably somewhere; 38, 39 years old.

So those people have families and have – their consumers, which is great because another constituency that we have for the network is obviously our advertiser base, so it makes us pretty attractive in that regard.