Could you please introduce yourself a bit and share some information about your background and how Xhail came to be?
Hi, I’m Mick Kiely, CEO at Score Music Interactive and founder of the Xhail technology. I’ve been an active musician and composer for over 30 years, beginning my career in the band scene, where I learnt music production skills old school. Two inch multitrack and a razor blade was considered high tech back in the mid 80’s. Then came an Atari computer, a copy of Cubase 2.0 and my life was set to change forever.
I started to compose for TV at a friends home studio and soon invested in a new Mac and a copy of Logic, a combination I still use today. I continued composing for TV, striking several production deals along the way, eventually finding myself at the high end of video games.
By 2011 I was caught up in the expanding app bubble which saw a massive surge in casual game production and other new media. Here was a space where the production music model began to crumble, something radical needed to happen.
This is when Xhail’s concept began. A solution uniting composers and musicians in a new and exciting way while driving the very thing an emerging world was crying out for “content”. In early 2013 we filed for patents, incorporated our company SMI and by the summer we had opened our doors and began the Xhail build.
Tell us more about the Xhail platform, namely how it will be used in the future and who will find it useful.
Built in a browser, Xhail is a very powerful solution to many emerging markets. It’s free and very easy to use, with users only being charged at the point of project completion. A user will set up an account and have a private log in. There they can create and save projects without incurring cost, until the final mix download, at which point a specific usage licence is charged and generated for the new unique music cue. There now exists a new generation of consumer who have a serious appetite for content. This demand for content is on a scale not seen before. Current solutions struggle to address scalability.
Our vision for Xhail and it’s future development is the first scaleable solution, a claim not boldly made by SMI, but by the very markets it’s poised to address.
Is Xhail completely web based? What are some of the technical limitations of making a song/cue on the web (streaming issues)?
The early versions of Xhail are to be web based, SDK based versions will be developed to facilitate future partnerships. Creating a cue online does have its challenges and streaming is one. We have successfully innovated a fast auditioning mechanism for Xhail which works very well.
We also degrade our content which helps with download streaming. This degradation also helps protect our composers content and reduces risk of content abuse or piracy. The quality of the content is low during the cue creation process but is reverted to high quality during the final download process after a licence has been generated for use of that content.
The power of the web is rapidly growing, bringing potential for very exciting developments both in future versions of Xhail and many other web based innovations.
How do you think Xhail will change how music for media is produced today?
Xhail allows for a users creative opinion to become a creative experience. There’s a famous old expression “I can’t explain exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I hear it”. This is still often the case and so a customer’s pain continues as they trawl through the catalogues of several or more production music libraries burning valuable time auditioning track, after track, after track. Xhail will relieve that pain while also bringing production value and creative power to the user in a way never before possible.
Xhails time is now, because the model has already changed, we now live in world where ‘content’ is king. We can only imagine what might be around the corner, but the future is about collaboration, creation and access to ‘content’. It’s no longer a case of what might happen, it’s simply the case of what is already happening.
There are some concerns regarding your platform namely from composers. How do you think will Xhail affect composers and their future work?
There’s been a bit of a knee jerk reaction to Xhail from a very small number of composers, namely by those who might see it as a threat. In truth we have no wish to disrupt, but to enable. Where a production has the budget to commission a composer, then a composer should always be commissioned.
The fact is that outside of an elite group, most composers and musicians struggle to make ends meet. While some occasional months are fruitful, most are lean, it’s just the way it is. There are many very talented composers and musicians who perpetually knock on doors which remain tightly closed and these same composers have excellent works with libraries which often earn only pennies instead of pounds. The current tracking mechanism is also inefficient, resulting in millions of dollars of composers revenue falling between the cracks of PROs. The fact is, the model has changed and new media and emerging markets are making demands for content in ways not addressable by the old model.
Xhails solution is not a race to the bottom. Our model has been very carefully structured in order to drive healthy revenues back to composers and musicians. This is a priority for us.
Without great talent and high quality content, we don’t have a product, so it’s a no brainer to move as much revenue as possible towards the source of that content. We have pioneered a model that we believe works and where collaboration holds the key to success, and that sees everyone winning, although there are some potential enablers who have instead decided to put a ban on collaboration.
Xhails platform will allow our composers to privately track the usage of their stem content, thus allowing them to see how their content is performing. We will also collect relevant data to support royalty tracking.
Xhail is already creating exciting new market opportunities. We’re seeing markets emerge because of its very existence. Since our reveal at A3E we have been inundated with not hundreds but thousands of client requests, many from markets we never considered would exist. These are new revenue streams for composers and musicians which couldn’t be realised or accessed prior to the Xhail platform.
How can a composer/session musician work with you in the future and how could you share more information about the licensing of their music?
If you are a composer or single/multi instrument session musician inspired by Xhail, we’d love to hear from you. We offer content providers a 50/50 split on front end sync and back end royalties. You retain 100% writers share and SMI retain 100% publishing. We have developed other technologies to assist composer content growth, thus driving maximum revenue to content providers.
Each provider will have a private login page where they can easily track their content usage, along with other additional report updates from SMI.
Thank you for taking time to do our interview. Do you have any tips, hints or motivational speeches for the readers.
I think it’s really important to remember that any technology, software or otherwise is useless, until wielded about in the hands of creative users. We see it all the time in this space. We can’t wait to see and hear what our creative users will do with Xhail. It’s an exciting time.