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Agency Work > Mountain Apple Company
CASE STUDY: MOUNTAIN APPLE COMPANY
The Mountain Apple Company produces and markets the best-selling recorded music in the history of Hawai‘i. Its music publishing division contains the most extensive Hawaiian and Polynesian music library in the world. Another division licenses music worldwide for television, motion pictures, music videos and broadcast advertising. The Company is also one of Hawai‘i's most successful music and video distributors. In another arena of operation, The Mountain Apple Company provides talent management and consulting for many of Hawai‘i's most successful entertainers. Innovative concert promotion , stage design and production, such as the Brothers Cazimero's annual May Day Concerts at the Waikiki Shell amphitheater, are another facet of the Company. The Mountain Apple Company produces live and recorded entertainment for conventions, incentive meetings and sales presentations.
Services:
We have been working with MAC as a client since 2001 at which time we developed their entire Web site, containing info on the 100s of Hawaiian Music artists that they represent. This also included designing and building out special areas for many of their more popular artists, with Press Releases, CD/DVD listings, Biographies, as well as Song samples. Over the course of about 3 years we were also creating new featured artist areas monthly leading this to being a very robust site with 100s of media files including Quicktime movies, streaming song samples, and other interactive elements. PCF actually produced many of these movies and prepared them for the Internet. This included coordinating Interviews and actually going onsite to record performances by the music artists. Being able to deliver this content on the Internet actually required the site to be hosted on its own dedicated server that we also setup and administer. From this server we provided them support for their email services, including the ability to conduct their “email blasts” which would send out their marketing materials / press releases to thousands of subscribers. We also setup and have been the Administrators for their Hawaiian Music Artist Discussion Message boards, which have grown to facilitating the discussions of thousands of island music enthusiasts. With areas like the message board that generate great exposure, we also conducted other Internet Marketing programs to expose the site even more on an ongoing basis, including Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords campaigns. Due to the success of the MAC Internet presence, they have gone mostly in-house with their continued Internet Development plans. Currently PCF administers the MAC Internet Radio Service that contains 40 hrs+ of the music by their artists and delivers it to listeners 24/7. It is our job to ensure that this system runs smoothly, as well as tracking the listeners.
Challenges:
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Over the years, there have been quite a few challenges. One in particular deals with our continued involvement with the development of MAC radio. We needed to take a system that was meant to run from several different computers and find a way to contain it all on one server that could handle hosting the songs, encoding the songs, and then broadcasting to the 1000’s of listeners each day with tracking features. This system also needed to be compatible with all types of computers and common Media Players (iTunes, RealMedia, Windows Media, Winamp, etc.), which engaged PCF to find a system that could be modified and support both tasks simultaneously.
Solution:
PCF Virtual was able to implement an open-source live-streaming audio system called Shoutcast that could deliver the necessary results and stay within the client’s budget for the project. Our team was then able to customize the Shoutcast program scripts and implement them onto the MAC dedicated Linux server where we now provide a scalable automated system. PCF also administers the further development, monitoring, and maintenance for this new system. This Internet Radio system now contains two separate stations (Traditional Hawaiian / Island Reggae), which we update monthly with the music that MAC provides.
Results:
The result for MAC has been a very successful integration to the Internet. The integration has helped to significantly increase sales from the current online store, where much of their business is now generated. Anyone can now log into the MAC site and listen to hours of the music that the client produces, read about it, and even share their thoughts with other visitors. You can now visit the site for information on just about every aspect of MAC’s business as well as access information on the stable of music artists that they represent. Over the years, PCF’s Web capabilities and promotional services have enhanced The Mountain Apple Company’s overall Web presence and increased the number of visitors to their Web site from a couple of thousand to the tens of thousands each month.
