Musictoday's mission is to help both emerging and established artists harness the power of the Internet to deliver their music, merchandise, and message to the growing global community of music fans on the Internet.

This is all accomplished on its campus outside of Charlottesville, Va., which supports business offices, a fully staffed call center, a full service ISP and over 100,000 square feet of warehouse and fulfillment space.

How did Musictoday grow out of the Dave Matthews Band?
Musictoday started as the online merchandising arm for the Dave Matthews Band. From the start, DMB built a very strong merchandise operation around its exhaustive touring schedule. Not only were they selling merchandise at shows, but they had a mail order operation as well. Once the Internet came along, Coran Capshaw, DMB's manager, brought the operation onto the Web. That's really how Musictoday started. Over the last few years we have greatly expanded our suite of services and our number of clients. In fact, we are really more a technology company than a music industry company; the music industry just happens to be our specialty.

What other services do you provide now, aside from e-commerce?
We also offer a suite of Web ticketing services, CD replication services, Web hosting, enhanced Web features and promotional services. Additionally, we maintain www.musictoday.com, a consumer-oriented live music information Web site on which we provide the industry's most comprehensive tour date database (including detailed show and venue information).

How did your tour date database evolve?
Well, this is actually how we got connected with CelebrityAccess. As everyone has hopefully seen, CelebrityAccess displays our tour date information on the site. We have been building out our database for a number of years now. What makes it unique, besides the fact that we consistently maintain more shows than Pollstar (today we have 58,763 events in our tour date database, as opposed to 50,227 at Pollstar, that's a 15% difference!) is our detailed venue and show information.

Artist tour information can be submitted to www.celebrityaccess.com/tourdates/index.html and www.musictoday.com to help us bolster the database. You can also get artist bios at www.musictoday.com, links to be able to buy merchandise, as well as links to articles.

What is a full-service online e-commerce provider?
A full-service online e-commerce provider handles every detail of the store/order process. This is something that is very unique about Musictoday, and it really sets us apart from other e-commerce providers. We do everything in-house and in one location, from building the store, to taking orders and providing customer service, to warehousing and fulfilling the orders. This makes the process cheaper and more efficient; our warehouse processing accuracy is 99.8%! We maintain over 100,000 square feet of available warehouse space for our fulfillment operation and staff a full-service call center five days a week (thus allowing for online, phone, fax and mail orders).

Regarding the merchandise itself, we don't manufacture merchandise, but through long-standing relationships we can facilitate merchandise production at great rates for our clients.

What is a client-branded store?
All of the stores we build are client-branded in that they match the look and feel of the artist's site. So if the customer clicks on SHOP at one of our client's Web sites, it brings them to a Musictoday-built and hosted store that looks just like the artist's site. This way the customer feels as if they are purchasing directly from the band. For example, check out www.trainline.com and click on store Train's official site and store.

Who are some of your store clients?
We are really excited about our client roster, which has been rapidly expanding over the last few years to include some of the biggest names in the music industry. Some of our established clients include: DMB, Santana, David Bowie (look for the store to be up soon), Cheap Trick, David Gray, Ruff Ryders, Phil Lesh, Deftones, Jurassic 5, MXPX, Disturbed, and Little Feat just to name a few. We also do stores for some great up-and-coming bands like Lake Trout and Sound Tribe Sector 9. We are confident that we are establishing ourselves as the premier store/e-commerce provider to the music industry.

You also provide client-branded ticketing sites?
Yes, our Web ticketing operation also grew out of DMB. We have been administering DMB's fan club ticketing (The Warehouse) since its inception. Over the past few years we have expanded the Web ticketing operation to other artists. It's a great value added service for an artist, to be able to sell tickets off their site in a branded environment. The system works great, and we have built it so we can offer really low service fees and excellent customer service. Again, we built it so the fans have the perception that they are buying directly from the artist, which is the whole point, to build fan support for our clients.

Do you also provide ticketing to venues?
Yes, we have also built a client-branded ticketing solution for venues that allows them to sell tickets off their Web sites. This is a simple will call based system that allows the venue to easily print out will call lists and to monitor sales online in real-time. As far as venues go, some of our venue clients include Martyr's in Chicago, Trax Nightclub here in Charlottesville and the Pickle Barrel Nightclub in Burlington, Vt. Check out http://trax.rlc.net and click through to the Concert Calendar!

Who are some of your ticketing clients?
DMB was our first client. We have also done ticketing for groups such as Medeski, Martin and Wood, Galactic, Disco Biscuits, Live, Blues Traveler, Bill Gaither, David Gray, DJ Logic, Guster and Santana.

What is CD replication?
We provide a full-service, retail ready CD replication service to bands of all sizes. From 1,000 piece orders to platinum orders, we deliver a top-shelf product and incredibly low prices. All we need from our clients is their master and artwork and we handle the rest. We have provided CD replication services for DMB, G Love and Special Sauce, Corey Harris and Acoustic Syndicate.

What are your other Web services?
We maintain an ISP and can host our clients' sites, which facilitates integration of stores, ticketing, etc. We offer services such as branded message boards and branded dynamic tour date pages as well. Furthermore, we administer e-mail list management and marketing for our clients.

How do your other web services fit in with the musictoday.com site?
www.musictoday.com is a place for live music fans to visit for all their live music needs. We have this amazing tour date database. We also maintain a superstore of merchandise (another platform to sell our client's merchandise), content including live music news updates, show reviews and album reviews. We also run ticket giveaways and other contests as well.

The wonderful thing about the Web site is that it's a great way to market and promote our clients. We can feature their stores, do ticket giveaways or collectible giveaways. We are always looking for new ways to help leverage the site to help promote our clients. We are finalizing a membership e-mail that will be a great tool to market to our ever-growing membership of live music fans.

Industry trends you foresee
Focusing on revenue and keeping costs down. Tech/Web companies seemed to have forgotten about this for a few years. I think that technology and the music industry will continue to merge. The technology/music revolution is still upon us, and we still need to give it a few years. Once more people are on high speed Web connections, when wireless technology progresses, and we have secure methods to transfer music, I think this industry is going to look really different.

Business advice to share
As far as this crazy tech/Web world goes, build a real, sustainable business. Hype only gets you so far. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people have learned this the hard way.

First industry job
This would be it, unless you count loading in and out for shows at a local club when I was in college an "industry job."

Best business decision
Instead of buying into the online hype, we buckled down and built a sustainable business.

Industry pet peeve
When people don't think out technology related projects. It's great to talk about ideas, but unless you have thought them out it's a waste of everyone's time to try to discuss and implement them.

Andrew may be reached at 804-244-7245; email: andrew@musictoday.com.

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