Photograph by George Sakkestad
Jon Monday, president of MusicWriter Inc., demonstrates how customers can select sheet music, MIDI computer disk files or audiocassette tapes from the company's NoteStation, a computer kiosk.
By Sue Fagalde Lick
Take Silicon Valley knowhow and marketing savvy, add music, and you have MusicWriter, Inc. The Los Gatos company is taking music sales into the 21st century.
MusicWriter produces NoteStation, a computer kiosk for music stores that creates custom copies of songs in sheet music, MIDI computer disk files and audiocassette accompaniment tapes.
NoteStation is the brainchild of Los Gatos High School graduate Jon Monday and his partner Larry Heller. Their company is based in a second-floor Knowles Drive structure crowded with boxes and folders in preparation for upcoming trade shows. Most of the company's 22 employees work in the Los Gatos office. Small branch offices are located in Southern California and the Midwest.
MusicWriter is a family business for Monday. His wife, Anna, whom he met at Saratoga High School when both were students, works with him. Paintings by Anna and their daughter Rachel, a recent UC-Santa Barbara art graduate, decorate the walls, along with vintage guitars and awards from Monday's music days.
NoteStation, a big square box with a computer inside, holds a whole store's worth of music. Customers use a touch-screen to choose from approximately 12,000 songs. The NoteStation displays a copy of the song on the screen and plays it out loud. The customer can raise or lower the key to make it easier to sing, then chooses a format.
The most common choice is sheet music, printed on heavy 32-pound paper and delivered at the cash register, where the customer pays $4.45 per song. Lyric sheets without the music are also available.
A newer option is the MIDI format, 3.5-inch disks containing digital information that enables MIDI-compatible computers, keyboards and synthesizers to produce music.
Customers can also buy karaoke-style vocal accompaniment tapes, produced on the spot for approximately $7.95.
NoteStations are available in 250 stores in the United States and Canada. Close to Saratoga is Music Music Music, 60 N. Winchester Blvd., one of nine Bay Area stores that test-marketed the first NoteStations in 1992.
Store owner Grant Tuttle says the kiosk has both advantages and disadvantages. People get impatient waiting in line for the machine or waiting for their songs to come out, he says. Most can't resist browsing through the titles before making their selection.
On the other hand, says Tuttle, "I'm never out of stock of anything." Music, Music, Music offers only the sheet music and MIDI formats. Regular customers for the latter include local professional musicians who
use them in their acts, Tuttle says.
Monday, 47, a Los Gatos High School graduate, is the son of one of the pioneers at the San Jose IBM plant. Growing up surrounded by electronics, he used to fix radios in his spare time and tinkered with an Atari 400. He also played guitar but was strictly amateur, he says: "I was in awe of real musicians."
Monday went on to work in the music industry as vice president and general manager of Takoma Records and marketing director of Chrysalis Records, helping to boost the careers of Blondie and Jethro Tull, among others.
He later worked as vice president of product marketing for Romox software distributors and vice president of operations and management information systems for Epyx, a supplier of entertainment software for the home computer market.
For MusicWriter, he teamed up with partner Larry Heller, who was a founder and president of Music Research Consultants and had worked as an artist manager, agent, record company executive and music publisher.
They had the idea for MusicWriter about 14 years ago, Monday says, but knew it was too soon. "We had to wait for technology to catch up to the idea." Affordable CD-ROM storage, low-cost laser printing and faster computers were essential to their success.
Monday and Heller went to trade shows and studied the business, then approached Warner Brothers. Without rights to use popular songs owned by the big music publishers, they would have no music to sell. Warner not only liked their idea, but became one of their biggest investors. Today, nearly every major music publisher has signed on with MusicWriter, Monday says.
Each time a song is reproduced on the NoteStation, the sale is recorded. At the end of the month, royalties are sent to the publisher to distribute to the copyright owners.
Monday believes the NoteStation will reduce bootlegging, homemade copies of songs passed among musicians who can't find the arrangements they want at stores.
The NoteStation is a boon for sheet-music buyers, Monday says, because no store can carry as many songs in the old pre-printed format, nor can they provide them in any desired key.
A variation on the NoteStation is the Christian Resource Center, a kiosk that offers Christian songs, as well as online catalogs for books, videos and other items. Berean Christian Store, 2841 Meridian Ave., San Jose, is the closest local outlet.
Upcoming additions for the NoteStations include music-oriented computer software and catalog browsing for books, videos and music accessories, Monday says.
For more information, call 364-2500 or visit the MusicWriter Web site at www.musicwriter.com.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, August 7, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved