Our Market

We offer a service that's something like "OCR (optical character recognition) for piano recordings." We take piano recordings and convert them back into the keystrokes and pedal motions that could be used to encode an identical live performance. This studio-quality, computer-controlled re-performance can, in turn, be re-recorded in the latest high-definition surround sound. For instance, old recordings from the 1920s through 1950s can be regenerated into new recordings, suitable for home theaters, satellite radio, and Internet downloads.

There are 100 years of piano recordings, in the vaults of the recording companies and in private collections. Many old recordings have been reissued, but don't sound very good by modern standards. Many other great recordings have never been released, because they were marred in some way that made them substandard. Live performances are often unreleaseable because of background noises or out-of-tune piano strings. They also may never have been released because they were recorded off the radio or on cassette recorders. Similarly, many wonderful studio recordings have never seen release, due to instrument or equipment problems during the sessions. We can bring these unheard treasures forward, to be re-recorded for new release.

The recording industry has embarked on the next set of consumer formats for high-definition surround sound. The new formats include DVD-Audio or Video and Super Audio CD (SACD). There are 35 million home surround systems in use today, a number growing quickly along with high-definition TV. The chicken-and-egg problem is bringing older audio material forward for re-release, which is where we help.

Our customers are record labels. We don't plan initially to offer a service to consumers - they will purchase from the record labels pristine, up-to-date recordings of performances by their favorite musicians. Record labels provide us with their copyrighted source recording, and we return to them either the live performance encoding or a new multi-channel high-def master audio recording. Our pricing and contracts are comparable to that of record producers: a combination of fixed cost and a portion of the revenue stream of the release.

Our drive is to help the copyright owners unlock the latent value in their back catalogs and vaults. Our best back-of-the envelope estimate puts the retail vault value of solo piano recordings (released and unreleased) in the tens of billions of dollars.