EastWest - ComposerCloud+

Sam Inglis Hello and welcome to the sound on sound people and music industry podcast with me Sam Ingalls in this episode I'm delighted to be joined by Doug Rogers Doug is president of east west and sounds online one of the world's leading virtual instrument and sample library companies He's also the owner of east west studios formerly western recorders in los angeles And in this podcast, we're going to be talking about their cloud based subscription plan, Composer Cloud Plus. Welcome, Doug. How are you? Doug Rogers I'm doing great. Excellent. So, over the last 30 years, we've seen a sort of explosive growth in sample libraries, to the point where it's one of the major business departments within the MI industry. Originally, Akai samplers and so on, then we had CD ROMs. Now, of course, samples are distributed online, and the cloud has become increasingly important. And at EastWest, Sounds online you've set up your own cloud based subscription services, which is called composer cloud plus Tell us a little bit about what that is and how it works I mean basically the commercial sample business Started 35 years ago because we were the first ones to put out a commercial drum sample CD We started ComposerCloud back in 2015. So we'd been in it for a long time at that point. Uh, it just became obvious to me that subscription services were the future because Well, a number of things. I mean, first of all, the record industry had already fully adopted it. And, uh, I didn't see how the music software business was going to escape that. So we were the first in our industry to, to put it together and, and make it work. And it wasn't that easy to do because we didn't have. The tools available that are available to all the other streaming services like spotify and apple music and things like that we had to create all the tools to make it all work when you're selling a product to somebody with a perpetual license basically it begins and ends with the with the purchase and giving them a license and you probably never hear from them again unless something goes wrong they need support with a subscription service you're more is holding their hand the whole time and you have to have it. You know, good communication with the users worldwide. You have to be able to control access. Because they come and go and they do. So that presented quite a few challenges. Plus in our, our business, we're very, very data heavy compared to other subscription services that are primarily streaming. We're not streaming at all. Our entire collection. There's around about three terabytes of data, so that's a lot of data to pay for as well, you know, that's, that's why you don't see too many free trials for us because it really costs us a lot when somebody goes to town on the content. And, uh, we're paying for it all per user. So we had to build tools in order to do all of the things that we wanted to do. Luckily, we have a very good software team, very experienced software team that have been in the industry as long as I have, that were able to build those tools, code those tools. And, uh, and of course, we also needed to go to Pace and talk to them about iLock. iLock was very much hardware key based at that point, and, um, that doesn't work in a subscription model at all, because iLock was very People don't want to buy a 50 key and they don't want to, they don't want to wait to get it. They want instant access. They want to use the service immediately. So we went to pace and said, you've got to make a machine version of this, uh, that they can actually not buy a key. I know that might cost you some money, but. You might make it up in terms of the numbers of users and we, so we had to do that. We had to renegotiate a deal with them to do this. And then it was, you know, even internally, I mean, I had a fight with my own people over the whole thing. It was like, why on earth would you want to give up 300 for a product instead of 20 bucks? There was an ongoing argument and everyone was trying to limit it to, well, we'll just include like a range of products, not all of them and, and no new releases. And there was just ongoing discussions with me and my team over the whole thing. And I just, I always thought from day one, if we don't make this as attractive. As buying products, it just never, it'll never work, even though in some cases, it doesn't make any sense because unlike others in our industry, we can spend millions on a production and that just goes into composer cloud, you know, it just gets added to what is what's there and we don't get another dollar from the subscribers. But that was the promise that we made, you know, you buy into this thing and, uh, you're set up for however long you want to be in there because you won't ever have to buy anything else. It's, it's all just going to be handed to you. Well, that's one thing that has grown along with the change in business model for sample libraries. Of course, the scale of the productions has grown over the years and back in the day when you could Produce a drum sample library in a few days of studio time with a single engineer and a single performer now You're you've got production budgets of millions and you're hiring entire orchestras and you're generating gigabytes of data Right, and then you've got the whole team to put it all together, which is You know, in the case of an orchestra, there could be, you know, 50 odd people involved, you know, over the course of a year minimum, I mean, we did the Hollywood orchestra series. I think we, we did it over a five year period. It wasn't continuous. It wasn't, we were working on other things, but we brought it out in sections, you know, strings, brass, winds, and percussion. And by the time the percussion had come out, it was like five years after the release of the strings. So they are big productions. They do cost a lot. And that was. Also a big factor in terms of. Can we make this work? And it was very difficult because we hadn't reached that J curve, as they call it, right? Where we had the numbers to offset what we were losing in terms of virtual licenses. So it took it took quite a while to get to that point. But thankfully, we did get to that point and, uh, it just continues to grow and there's just no turning back now. Of course, everyone's trying to do it. I think that's a good thing because it's like, even though in the early days, it was costly in terms of losing those perpetual sales. We now have a much, much larger user base. And we have revenue coming in the first of the month, every month, you know, so every month on day one, we know we've got X amount of revenue coming in that month and that never happened before the perpetual business we would have, we'd have months where, where things were just incredibly great and we'd have months where there was just nothing going on because there was no new release. And because it took us so long to get out these new releases. You know, it was either a feast or a famine. So, ComposerCloud has definitely solved that riddle. It gives us a known amount of income with which to work with, which is also good for the subscribers because it means that we have money to reinvest into, into doing things the way we like to do them, which is pretty much as well as you can, you know, uh, it's, it's just turned out to be. A really good business model as well for our company and it's happening all over the other industries as well. The video streaming business and, uh, I mean, all, all of the traditional businesses that were out there doing things the old way, you know, movie theaters with, with movies and, and, um, CDs of music and things like that. They're all, they're still there, but it's really very small version of what they used to be. Because these subscription services have just completely disrupted all of those industries. We're also seeing subscription services coming to dominate elsewhere in the MI business, of course, with DAWs, for example. And one of the interesting things you see there is that it kind of frees the developers of those DAWs from having to produce these enormous Updates to entice people to part with another hundred dollars this year and then another hundred dollars next year instead They can add smaller updates as they go along and there they seem to be a lot more free To develop things in a more varied way. Is that something that you find with with your business, too? You know, we still do perpetual sales So, I mean those those monthly sales can fluctuate a lot depending on how much we sell in terms of perpetual licenses You But we know at the beginning of the month, we're going to have, you know, a certain amount to play with, if you like. So it helps us plan ahead much easier, um, knowing that that income is coming through the door. It frees us up to do, I think, bigger and better productions because of that. There's really no downside. I mean, it's the other aspect of it that I like is it sort of levels the playing field, the people that couldn't really afford to spend thousands of dollars on these high end virtual instruments. They can't, they can do that now. You know, it's most people can afford 20 bucks a month. For students is even half that so it's it's kind of level the playing field They now have the same tools that the the top composers use. So at the end of the day we've democratized the the the music making business And it all comes down to their talent at the end of the day. It's not a resource issue. It's a, it's more whether they've got it or they don't, that kind of feels good too, that we can provide, uh, these tools we painstakingly create to somebody that may not be even going to make 1 in the music industry, you know, they just do it as a hobby or they want to explore the creativity or have some, uh, some reason for wanting to do it, but they don't want to use. Bad sounds because they'll always sound bad, even if they've got talent. So that's another good aspect of it. I think that it brings a lot more people into our ecosystem. And I guess even full time professionals will quite often be in a situation where they need a specific sound for one project that they're probably never going to use again. And a service like ComposerCloud makes all those sounds available to them on demand. Absolutely. In that situation, say you were given a job and you had to create something for a television or game or film and it needed a specific sample, you'd have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars to get that sample. Now it's just at your fingertips. And the way that we have Composer Cloud configured now, you don't even need to download like a whole collection. You can download just that specific sound. You can search and audition and you can download it literally in seconds from the cloud. You don't have to have it on your local computer. And then once it does download, we're very cleverly archiving it on your local computer. So you don't have to download it again. So it will go into a folder that if you were, if you were going to download the whole product, it would have created folders to put everything where it needed to be. We're just putting them in a folder. Into the same folders and building it up incrementally, if they don't need the whole thing, where that became very important to me is because, as you said, from the outset, you know, we operate five studios in Hollywood, very successful studio. I mean, 172 Grammy nominations just in the last decade, more than anybody in the entire world. But I saw a situation where these people working in the studios, they always looking for something unusual to sort of add some flavor to what they're working with. I just went back to our software team and said, I know the housekeeping involved in this is insane, but we've got to figure out how to do this. Otherwise, it just doesn't work in studios. So a couple of years back, we pulled that one off. Actually, with the release of Opus, which will be two years right now, we had that feature included and it's been a game changer for our users because it speeds the process up. There are still some prefer to download the whole product and they can do that. They do it overnight, but for people in a hurry or for people in the studio, people in a situation where they don't have the time to wait to download an enormous product. I mean, Hollywood Orchestra is almost a terabyte on its own. They can get access to what they need. Specific instruments, you know, less than a minute. So that's something that no one else offers So let's talk a little about opus because this is essentially the front end that the user sees When they load one of your products into their daw, they're using the opus plugin But it's also essentially the interface between them and your servers which supply these sounds so it's a kind of a very integrated interface System that must have been quite a complex thing to develop. It was very complex You know, we used to have another software product could play and that was our initial Entry into the music software business, which is a total nightmare Because it's like a metamorphosis. Everything's always Moving and changing around you and if you've got the major systems like, you know, Apple Microsoft changing OS's you've got You know, you've got the DAWs changing their versions, but there's about 30 different DAWs out there now they have to support. So you're really, you're really sort of swimming in this, in this metamorphosis of change. So, you know, I have to give credit to, to our software team for really, uh, you know, staying on top of all of that. That's quite an accomplishment, but Opus, like I said, we had play, play was a learning experience, but it wasn't the greatest software. Even we knew that. Then we had the opportunity of hiring Wolfgang Kundras, who was one of the creators of Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One. He was looking for a new challenge, so we, we brought him in, and then we got extra lucky because the developer of Kontakt, the native instrument Kontakt, Wolfgang Schneider, had moved on from me and I, and we talked him into joining our team as well. So we had two Wolfgangs. Titans of the music software business. I mean, basically, these guys have written software. They're just millions and millions of people use every day. So we had some very experienced people involved in building this thing. And initially, the idea was to make play better because building software from the ground up is very, very Business for everybody. Time consuming and expensive operation, you're literally starting from a no code to millions and millions of lines of code. So the initial idea was to bring these guys in and make play better. But in a very short time, they, they came to me and said, it's just not that well written. We just rather start from the ground up. We want clean code. Uh, we want code that we know. We understand that is up to the standard we're normally working with. It's going to be expensive. We're warning you, but at the end of the day, you're going to have something very special. And that's what happened. It took five years, but they delivered Opus to us two years ago. Same time we released an updated version of the. Hollywood orchestra opens edition and added new things like orchestrator, which is a very, very powerful tool. And of course, because it was brand new software and all of these software programs use other people's software as well. They all do IBM licensing for certain parts of it. We were able to build a system that had the latest and greatest of everything in it, including support for, for the Apple Silicon. Uh, native, I think they told us we were the first company to actually put out a native silicon third party product and that matters because everything else, if it's not native, it's, it's running an emulation when you're running an emulation, you've got tremendous speed issues. Because it's having to do a conversion, like, every second. So, having it run native is, is very important to the performance. And the performance of Opus is just, run rings around content. It just does, even the guy that wrote content says that. It's never easy, like, we're sound guys, like, Nick and I are sound guys, you know. We were not in the software business. And it was a, a total learning experience for us getting into that business. It's a complete different animal than going into studios and recording instruments. And you really have to kind of, it's a learning curve and you have to really learn it real fast. Otherwise, major, major mistakes can get made. But we did it. I'm really happy with the software and we continue to improve it. Every week we have a meeting with these guys. Most of them are based in Germany. Most of our sound team is based in Hollywood in the US But most of our software developers are based in Germany. The Germans are very very good at software development I don't know why maybe they have better universities that teach that than in other countries do but if you think about all the software It's out there I would say probably 90 percent of was developed in Germany even if it's under a US brand and of course Opus goes Way beyond what most sampler instruments do for instance using The orchestrator tool that you just talked about. Tell us a little bit about the concept behind that. We have a great deal of dialogue with Hollywood composers because we're all there, you know, so we get to meet them, we get to talk to them, we get feedback from them about what they like and don't like, and hopefully the good stuff goes into the next product. A lot of them are on tight deadlines, particularly if they're doing television series, some of them have to put out, you know, 20 minutes of music a week, and that's a lot, you know, so they were saying to us, we really would like to have a tool that handles repetitive stuff that we do all the time. So we partnered with this German company called Sonoscore. Sonoscore had already done this, but on a very basic level. But we heard it and we thought, you know, they're the people to work with on this. They also had a team of about eight or ten composers that work on games out of Germany. And so they had a great deal of talent in their team as well, to draw from in terms of developing the presets. The presets, you basically just bring it up inside Opus and then you kind of pick your poison, you know, it's like we're, you know, what is it that's going to work with, with, with a piece that I'm working on, but it's also a starter. It's not like paint by numbers. There's a little over 600 presets, you know, you can change any aspect of it. You know, you can replace instruments, other instruments. I mean, there's, you really can make it your own. And, uh, but it gets you started. Uh, there's a very good walkthrough available. It sounds online, uh, under the Hollywood orchestra, Opus edition, that I encourage people to go and watch. It gives a very good run through of how, how it operates in its basic form. And then in addition to that, they can actually use the software to create their own custom presets. So it's user presets and presets that we provide. It's always at the back of our mind to try and make the process, which is quite complex, easier to use. You know, we feel like we can reach more people if we, if we make it easier to use. It's the old Steve Jobs mantra. You know, if you have to read a manual, you lost already. Things should be intuitive. The product itself should be pretty straightforward. I think to use for someone that's. Relatively experienced one of the thing that's changed since the early days of sample libraries and in particular in recent years We've seen a lot of people sort of fretting at the limitations of the MIDI protocol and we've seen now the launch of MIDI 2. 0 We've got MPE. Is that something that's featuring? Increasingly in your work to a degree. We were not happy with MIDI 2. 0 One of our software team members was a, was a member of that group and really thought that they didn't really listen to real world situations. So we still feel like it's got a long way to go as, as with these other expression type things, they tend to be put together by technical people rather than people that actually do this stuff for a living. And run into these real issues. I mean, it's good that we don't, we're not still MIDI 1. 0. I'm not saying there's no value in it. I'm just saying that I think there was a real opportunity there to do something better than what got done. Maybe it will happen in the future. So internally within Opus, are you using MIDI or do you have your own kind of control protocol? We're just using the same protocols as everyone else. We're always sitting inside a door, so you're always dealing with MIDI. It's what fiends opens, basically. And whether that comes from the DAW or it comes from something like Orchestrator or it comes from something like WordBuilder, which is our voice software, that's what we're manipulating all of the time. Of course, we have very sophisticated tools on board to deal with different MIDI situations in lieu of a standard. That's it. So a lot of the stuff that we wanted to do, we wanted them to do. We've done ourself, but every time you get into that realm, of course, you've got to update it all the time. And it's, it's just an ongoing circus. But that's the only way to, to get things done. Sometimes it's just do it yourself. I mean, we started off using another company's software contact in the early days, and just decided after a period of time that in order to do the things we wanted to do, we had to make our own. They weren't interested in the things that we were wanting to do. So it was either get gobbled up by the competition or, or make the painful decision to go ahead and do the software development and it's no easy task. But now when I look back on it, regardless of the time and the money and all the anguish and finding the right team and all the rest of it, it was the right decision. It gave our company its own path forward. Don't think we have any, what I consider, direct competitors. They have their own software division. Everyone tends to rely on someone else. Uh, or they have some products that they're using Java with, which is a very basic language. Uh, you know, if you're doing loops and stuff like that's fine, but not when you get into multi sampled, multi velocity instruments with masses of articulations, you need some very, very complex and powerful software to be able to handle that because we don't just have to handle it on our computers that tend to be Above the norm we have to handle it on people's off the shelf computers as well, you know Otherwise, that's another major expense kind of takes away the economic advantage of subscriptions. For example returning to Orchestrator and word builder for a moment. I mean obviously these kind of tools that are designed to be assistants to composers There's a lot of talk out there now about the use of AI and machine learning to develop these kinds of tools, although I'm not entirely convinced that when people talk about AI they're always actually using AI. Um, is this something you've explored at all? Yes, but, and you're right, they're mainly talking about machine learning rather than AI. AI is a whole different thing altogether. AI is the control architecture, but what gets fed into the beast is called machine learning. It has tremendous potential, it's not there yet, in my opinion. Everything to me still sounds too robotic. They're out on an all out warfare to replace musicians. Whether they pull that one off, we'll see. There's a lot of people with a lot of money been trying to do it for a long, long time. And so far, in my opinion, they haven't done it, nor do I want them to do it. I don't think that's a good use of AI. You know, we don't want to put artists out of work. And yet you've got these tech heavy companies that really only care about money that will do it in a heartbeat if they can. So we've never cooperated with any of them and they've asked us, we've just said, no, we're not interested in putting our customers out of business. I mean, why, why, why would we do that? I just read this morning that Meta have come to market with some new tool in which they went to Shutterstock and they licensed 30, 000 tracks. The shadow stock had and fed it into machine learning, did machine learning on it all so that this thing can sort of put out these AI tracks that they think will save people money. But in my opinion, all it does is devalues the musician once more. They're, they're, they're decreasing the market for, for musicians. I don't think that's a good use of new technology. No, I agree. But on the other side of it, there may be potential for AI based tools, for instance, to help people with orchestration. You could say, here's my theme. You know, what do you suggest if I wanted to orchestrate this in a romantic style? Exactly. It's a good, if you're having a writer's block or something like that, it's a good, it's a good tool to sort of maybe set a direction, but it doesn't have the nuances of a human composer. It never will have, in my opinion, because human composers bring emotion to the piece. And these are just computers. They're all zeros and ones, you know, so they can train it, but what are they training it with? The training was stuff that's happened in the past. How do you develop future music by only using past music? There's a, there's a big disconnect there. And while I'm positive that the, the giants like Meta and that will introduce these products and they will replace a lot of music that would have been developed by humans. They've been at it for a long time now, and we've been watching it for a long time, and it hasn't got that much better. I can still tell an AI generated track, like, in a second. You can just tell the timing's all wrong, the Even the sound of it sounds like old, you know? It sounds like something, like, back in the feline days, you know? So, I agree that AI is here to stay. It's like the internet. The internet's not gonna go away. It's like, AI is here to stay. But we have to We have to figure out the best uses of it to help musicians and not hinder them. I'm a bit concerned about that because there's a lot of people that don't really care about the nuances of, of music and, and how it affects people emotionally, and those people will always do anything to save money. So it will have an impact on the music industry. And having said that, we also got accused of having an impact on the music industry at the start of our business. I was going to say back in the day, there was a whole campaign against sampling and how sampling would put orchestras out of business, and that doesn't seem to have happened. No, in fact, the complete opposite. I mean, I'll go back further in the days of the melatonin, the British musicians union tried to get a band. I mean, you, you, you must know this, right? Yeah. Well, that was never going to happen because it never sounded like an orchestra that simulated an orchestra in a kind of a quasi keyboard style. And in my opinion, it just became a, uh, a different character. It formed the basis of progressive rock, you know, with yes, Genesis and all those people, it wasn't even a realistic concept that they would ever get their hands on doing orchestras in the studio. So it was, it was a poor man's orchestra. The same thing, of course, happened at the start of this business where. There are always the people that say, you know, you're, you're putting people out of business, but as you said, that just hasn't happened. There's millions and millions more people making music nowadays as a result of having this technology in their home for 20 a month. Then when I, I started the business in the eighties, you know, in the eighties, you pretty much had to have access to a studio studios were expensive. I worked in studios in the eighties and the studio rates in the eighties were higher than they are now. That's how important they were to the music production process. So in order to have access to those studios, the studios I was working in in LA at the time, 240 an hour. I mean, you had to have a record contract and to have a record contract, you had to be selected by A& R who were very judicious in terms of who they. They took on, there was only X amount of artists that each record company would take on. So there was a small pool of people that actually got to make music. And now, anyone can make music, whether you're talented or not. You don't have to rely on some gatekeeper to tell you whether you can make music or not. Uh, and you can do it for next to nothing. So, and to a releasable standard, it's complete opposite to what they all threw at us in the early days, you know, now I have this sort of dichotomy because I have studios as well. So I see firsthand like what impact it's had on the recording studio industry. And it has had a big impact on the recording industry. The middle level recording studio has disappeared. It's just gone because those people are working at home, but the, the, the high level top level studios that have amazing acoustics, big rooms, primarily old vintage equipment that was made at a time where money was of no object. They weren't making them to sell them. They were making them to use in that facility using the best components money could buy. Which is impossible nowadays. They're all in this sort of race to the bottom to sort of put out something that's, they can, they can get someone to buy at a certain price. It's all built for a price. That never happened back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Everything was manufactured from the best components. So that's why studios like East West still use, primarily, very old equipment. Most of our equipment is, you know, 50 years old and we, we didn't throw it out because there's nothing that sounds better that we could replace it with. But in the digital world, in the plugin world, what you're doing is the equivalent of what those old studios did. You're making these products without compromise and a service like Composer Cloud allows them to be available to everyone. Right. And, and I think that's an important point because while, uh, it's, it's still true that the majority of our users still don't have access to the studios at the prices that we charge, we do, so we do the recording for them. We always partner on these projects with somebody. Nick and I always figure out what it is that we're trying to achieve. And then we, we either know, we find out who has spent their entire life doing this to a high degree and usually the most awarded in, in their field. And we bring them in and we work with them on, on the projects, like Sean Murphy, 5, 000 movies, all the Star Wars movies and all, all of the biggest movies in the world. This guy has engineered and mixed. And so, you know, we brought them in to do Hollywood orchestra. And another one that we haven't announced it, but it's going to be coming out early next year. The first symphonic orchestra we did 20 years ago, we, we worked with Professor Keith H. Johnson, who at that time was 13 time Grammy winning classical recording engineer, because I wanted to do an orchestra in a concert hall. No one had ever done that. And I didn't think they've done it since. They may be, they have, but I'm not aware of anything. We wanted to do it in a concert hall. It was like, well, we need somebody that really knows how to record an orchestra in a concert hall. And he already had like 11 Grammys or something at that point. So we talked him into doing it. We're very good at talking these people into doing it. I don't even know why they do it. I think, uh, I think after once they get halfway through the project, they wonder that themselves, what am I doing? And we got Keith to do that product. It's still one of the best sounding orchestral libraries, I think, in existence. It just doesn't have true legato, which is something that Hollywood orchestra does, because we had unlimited time in the studios to do that. And then a concert hall, a busy concert hall, you can only get max. Couple of weeks at a time. We went back twice, but we still didn't get the true legato. It still sounds fantastic, but there was another case where we used somebody that had an amazing track record. Interesting thing about Keith is he'd actually worked with Alan Parsons on this thing called the Project Tron, which was sort of the, the thing that came after the Tron. It was like Alan had ideas about how to improve the the Tron, and he also went to Keith because Keith was involved in the creation of the CD and, and HDCD, and he, the guy's like. Like Bill Putnam, who started our studio, he was just a genius in so many different areas, you know, understood the electronic side as well as the, the sound side. So that was the angle that I went to him with. I called him up and I said, I hear you work with Alan on this thing called a Projectron. He said, Oh, yeah, yeah. It was like, you know. Long time ago, I said, yeah, we want to do a better one because we didn't want to do a better one. We had no, no, no interest in doing a better one. We wanted to do the ultimate orchestra at that point, but that's how we wrote them into it. It turned out incredible. It gives you a great deal of confidence when you spending a million plus dollars on something to have somebody like that sitting at your side. It's almost like an insurance policy and the end result is I guess what they call democratization I can't afford to spend a million dollars on getting a symphony orchestra to record my scores But I can't afford 20 a month nor could you be able to hire Sean Murphy? That's the other thing It's like you're having access to this kind of talent is expensive And so that's something else that you know, we pay and it ends up in the product I mean, you know, cause we've won a lot of sound on sound awards and we've won a lot of tech awards. There's a lot of competition, good competition that you're up against, but we have more than all of them. And I think part of it is because we did make good decisions about the team that we put together and how we did it and how much money was never, ever a discussion point. It was like, if we needed extra money to finish something, right. We found the money. You can't go and spend 50 million on something. The market's not there to support it. But within reason, we spend more than most. And I think that's why they're successful. And Hollywood Orchestra is by far the biggest selling orchestra library ever, ever made, according to all the retailers. And it's got the most awards. You know, you have Sean, you have, uh, you have our crack software team with the Wolfgangs, Nick and I have been doing this for a long, long time. I mean, I've been doing it for 35 years. He's been, he's been around for about 30 of those 35 years. We also have been involved in, in, in most of the tech developments in the industry. Streaming from hard drive happened because I happened to partner with these guys that worked at Rockwell that came to me with this concept. And when I saw the concept actually worked, I mean, that that's changed the industry completely. It's the old thing. Like we invented everything. We get credit for nothing. Well, I'm giving you credit, Doug. Doug, thank you so much for taking part in this podcast. It's been amazing to talk to you and hear all these stories. Congratulations on the success of Hollywood Orchestra and Composer cloud in general. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next. Hoping it's the ultimate project from, but I suspect it's going to be even more ambitious than that. Been amazing to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much. Thank you. 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