Damon Williams
Damon Williams joined Music Choice in 1998, spending his first years with the company as the lead programmer for the Urban music channels, which under his direction, emerged as the most popular channels in the line-up. In his decade at Music Choice, Williams has risen from the Urban programming role to VP of Programming and Production. He has been instrumental in helping move the company from one that distributed content ranging from music and videos to also being an original content developer.
He helped launch the Music Choice On Demand video network that quickly became the most-popular On Demand network in the country. He was a vital member of the team that developed and launched the network’s broadband music site and its music service for mobile phone subscribers. He also works closely with the company’s cable partners, music labels, artists and the advertising community.
Williams’ background prior to joining Music Choice included programming roles within Radio One, Infinity Broadcasting and Willis Broadcasting. It was in these roles that he honed his creative talents which were vital for his part in guiding the production teams that develop Music Choice original content such as Artist of the Month, Fresh Crops, Tha Corner, and Rock U.
FMQB recently caught up with Williams for an inside look at the programming mind behind the award winning, multi-platform video and music network that reaches millions of consumers nationwide.
You have been with Music Choice for a decade. What are some of the significant changes you have seen in the company and in yourself during that time?
In the late ’90s, the radio business was changing so much with consolidation, as a programmer, I began to feel that it wasn’t as interesting as it used to be when you could be in a market competing against a couple of stations and trying to drive revenue. When the cluster mentality started, radio really changed and I was looking for something new that would be moving the business forward. When I saw the opportunity at Music Choice, I jumped at it. A lot of people thought I was crazy to leave radio and come here. But, it really helped me become a better executive to work at a company leading the way in music programming on the TV platform and the things that we’ve done with Video On Demand. We were also really the first company to offer music videos on cell phones that consumers could purchase. So, being a member of the team that actually did all of those deals was a huge opportunity. It’s a much different experience than being in radio and focusing on programming and delivering ratings. It’s a matter of doing the programming, delivering the viewer ship, but also directly being involved with the overall company strategy and also the business deals that support the strategy.
Were you always looking to move into more of an executive role and out of the day-to-day programming?
Well, I always want to be relevant. In today’s environment, companies are looking for executives that have all of the tools and are able to add that creative perspective to the business side. At heart I’m a creative guy. I’m a programmer, but at the same time the folks on the business side need that perspective when looking at the best way to do a deal. That’s what I bring to the company, and I hope that’s what my CEO Dave Del Beccaro appreciates about me.
You’ve been instrumental in helping Music Choice move from a content distributor to also being a content developer. How important is creating original programming for the company’s growth?
It was critical to establish to all of our partners and consumers that we’re not just a destination that plays music. We do understand that in this business you have to have a brand. So in order to build a brand you have to create content, especially on the VOD platform. We knew that just offering music videos alone would not be enough to grow the brand. So, in looking at what type of content we needed to establish, we looked at what was best for our brand, but also what would allow us to partner with other companies. What would be important to the cable companies? What would be important to the music labels?
The first two initiatives that I developed, were Fresh Crops and Artist of the Month. Fresh Cropsis our new and emerging artists program, where essentially we take an artist and put them into a programming and marketing initiative and claim the artist as the next big thing. Through that program we’ve been instrumental in helping break some important careers for artists like Chris Brown, Panic At The Disco, Taylor Swift, and right now there is a group that we’re excited about called Prima J, which consists of two young female artists on Geffen Records. Music Choice is the only music video outlet that’s playing their video. They’ve done over a million orders. They’re going to be on Fresh Crops next month. We think these two young ladies are going to be the next big thing. So, from a strategy standpoint, it was important to make sure our original content was valuable in breaking new acts.
Our cable partners were looking for content initiatives that would help separate them from their competitors in satellite, so we started Artist of the Month in October 2006. That program was set up to deliver huge A-list acts for the cable partners to have Music Choice Video On Demand content that wasn’t available anywhere else, especially on satellite. Through that program we’ve had artists like Beyoncé , Avril Lavigne, Foo Fighters. Currently Snoop Dogg is our Artist of the Month. A long list of A-listers have been involved with Artist of the Month, and have delivered huge usage numbers helping establish the VOD platform.
We wanted to establish the platform not only with music videos, but also from a content perspective. In fact, we’re one of the only companies to really invest and produce original content for the VOD platform, and we’ve been doing it the longest. We really understand how to deliver it. Most of the content is in short form, five- to seven-minutes long, which really fits the profile of how consumers use that platform. It’s not really a 22-minute platform like linear television.
This month we’re very excited about our We Love Hip-Hop programming. We’re actually doing our first episodic content and we’re marketing and promoting it for consumers to come back and watch it every week. This is part of our strategy to really establish ourselves as a network on the VOD platform. We want consumers to view us as any other network in any other space, and know that they can turn to Music Choice to consistently find new and fresh content.
What do you feel has been your most successful programming initiative? Is it one of the shows that you already mentioned or is there something else that sticks out?
Artist of the Month has been the most successful in terms of getting the labels to commit their most valuable assets and trust that we will make their brand shine on a new platform. That is a huge accomplishment for Music Choice and our programming team. There was a lot of selling that we had to do in terms of talking to the labels and managers. Beyoncé , for example, delivered amazing usage numbers, but it was a process to get a guy like Mathew Knowles to understand and believe in the platform. Once he was introduced to Music Choice, he was blown away and gave us a very prized asset in this business.
However, I’m proud of what we’ve done with Fresh Crops. There’s been a void in the industry for some time in terms of taking a risk on an artist. Fresh Crops is a platform for labels that have a lot of acts coming out and don’t really have a place to go or, more importantly, they have not established a story at radio yet. I’m proud of Fresh Crops from the standpoint of it feels great when an artist like Chris Brown comes back to Music Choice and he appreciates us and knows our people. He knows our producer; our programmers, and Music Choice feels like home when he comes back to Music Choice.
Our Hip-Hop show, Tha Corner, has been an important part of what we’ve been doing over the years. Hip-Hop is a huge genre, but artists haven’t really had a platform to be able to speak out the way that they want. What we’ve done with that show over the years is provide a platform where some of these artists can come out and speak about issues that are important to them, but also issues that are important to the Hip-Hop culture.
Those shows have really been the anchor, and we’re very, very proud of the brand.
How would you define the Music Choice consumer group?
Music fans from 12-34 who want a destination to discover all types of music. That’s what Music Choice really offers, and that’s what we really see in the data. We see new artists in our Top 10 the minute that we debut their video. We see genres find an audience, like Metal, which really doesn’t have much of a home anywhere on radio outside of a college radio format. Our audience is a little more female, 52% female, 48% male and is 63% White, 21% Black, and 12% Hispanic. We have numbers that are reflective of the general population. What we see with Music Choice a lot of times are consumers that don’t over think the genre, but they think more about the music. Consumers don’t look at music so genre-based anymore, especially on the younger end, and we see that in our data.
There’s been a lot of talk with XM/Sirius merger about who they compete against. You can almost put Music Choice into that category since you’re competing for people’s entertainment time through music artists. Who do you consider as your main competition?
We’re competing for the hearts and minds of the 12 to 34 demo, and that demo is on TV, online, using cell phones, and using media in ways that are really new in terms of how they consume it. In other words, they watch TV while they’re texting on their cell phones. They want TV programs online. From a competitive standpoint, we look at anyone who is trying to get those eyeballs from 12 to 34 year-olds. Obviously, the usual suspects are the Viacom properties, Fuse, traditional terrestrial radio, XM and Sirius. When we look at the VOD Platform, we have to hone in on who’s trying to own the hearts and minds of consumers in VOD and there are some independent guys out there that are all trying to fight for eyeballs.
There’s really no one on the video side that’s competing with us in terms of usage. Clearly consumers have decided to get videos from the Music Choice free On Demand platform. The network is available in over 30 million homes nationwide. To date, we have realized over 1.6 billion orders, and average 85 million orders a month. We expect to do a billion orders this year. Our music channels reach 39 million homes across the country. For a consumer, Music Choice is a very comfortable brand. That’s one of the big reasons why we’re dominating the space.
I’ve found people that use Music Choice to be passionate about the brand. A friend of mine recently switched from cable to DirecTV and mentioned he was disappointed with the XM channels that were available.
Your friend, as a consumer, has a different expectation of what he wants to hear at home versus what he will tolerate in the car. The Music Choice programming philosophy has always been to create a great experience that works for consumers that spend huge amounts of time listening to the service. Consumers expect to hear a lot of new music. They expect those music channels to be a discovery zone. It’s the same philosophy with VOD. What happens with XM and Sirius is they’ve got a bunch of radio guys that think they’re back in a local market, playing a record 70, 80 times a week, like they’re still programming to Arbitron. On top of that, you have drops and deejays talking, and it ruins the experience within your household because you don’t want it to be intrusive. So that’s why your friend is really frustrated.
Music Choice is offered through Sprint and AT&T. Give me some of the success stories with your wireless initiatives.
The biggest success story was offering consumers, very early in the process, the opportunity to get music videos on their cell phones. To cut that deal with the labels and actually create that model was very pioneering. No one really had that model. Most of the carriers were looking to do initiatives on their own. People weren’t really sure how the model was going to work out. So creating the model with the rental, purchase and subscription options for the consumer was a huge success story.
We’ve done some promotions and some unique things on the cell platform, but obviously our overall strategy is to be a multiplatform network. We want to be able to offer consumers similar or the same content everywhere they go. In other words, if we give you Artist of the Month on television, we want to be able to give you some of that content on the cell phone, even if it’s only in a highlight type of format, which obviously works better for that type of platform. For us, the cell platform was just a bigger part of our overall strategy to make sure Music Choice is available wherever consumers are.
Talk a bit about the Music Choice programming team’s key members and some of their more important functions.
We have a great team here. We have Justin Prager, who has been in the business for years. He worked at a number of music networks. Justin is the guy who is most passionate about Rock and Pop and he’s the guy who comes down to my office and says, “I found this band; I think they matter.” He’s done a great job in that area.
On the Urban/Latin programming side, Lamonda Williams heads up that group. She comes from a radio background having worked with just about all of the major companies out there. She is huge in the Urban world, and a great programmer that brings a lot of creativity and initiative, not just to the Urban side of programming but to the entire team.
As the leader of the team, I try to think outside of the whole genre thing. Obviously, they have their niches that they’re working on, but Justin’s perspective is very important on an Urban project and Lamonda’s perspective is very important on a Rock project because, as a team, we want to make the right decision to get consumers paying attention to our services.
On the Latin side, we recently brought in Ricky Ricardo to get us going in that area and establish some new Latin initiatives. We’re planning on launching a Latin program in late 2008. The Hispanic consumer base is strategically important to our cable partners. Obviously, on the label side, formats like Mexicana are selling huge amounts of records, so we want to make sure that we’re positioned well there.
One other person who is important to the team is Senior Manager of Production Stacy Mello. We produce everything in-house. We don’t farm out any type of creative work. Stacy actually leads that team to produce all of our shows. We deal with a very small, efficient team. If you watch any of our content, it’s competitive, if not better than what is out there amongst our competitors. She does a great job of delivering that content without a lot of resources.
What are you excited about for the future of Music Choice?
Video On Demand as a platform is really starting to gain critical audience size, in terms of the number of households that it’s now in and what it’s projected to do. With the challenges facing the music business today in terms of what is the right business model and where do you really pull the financial trigger on an artist, Music Choice is the number one destination for new and emerging acts. When you look at all of our platforms in terms of the number of people we can reach through the music channels and with TV and VOD, we’re really a huge testing ground for a label. It’s important to have the usage data available for them from the Video On Demand service, which is valuable to a label in terms of how they should guide their marketing strategy.
Our business model and partnership with the labels is important. The fact that there is a shared revenue model for them and that they are able to monetize the usage of their videos on the platform is also important. Obviously the service is free to consumers, but the VOD platform is ad supported. We have some exciting new interactive products launching soon that will strengthen our position on the TV platform.
** QB Content by Michael Parrish **
