Fall 1994 - Hip Clips

You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.

And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.

By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.

Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?

CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!

Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.

But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.

For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.

Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.

Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.

When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....

This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.

I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.

In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.