Pedram Abrari had a very difficult job and little time to do it: quickly build the Pono music store and all the related software. The site would need to be able to easily scale to handle our expected large number of customers from around the world. It was a huge task that needed to be completed by the time the players were shipped in October.
A SIMPLE EXPERIENCE
Neil’s vision was for the store to be much simpler to use than the existing sites that sold downloaded music files, and he wanted it to be focused on high-res music. He wanted to show only one album of any performance, the one with the highest-quality audio—not the multiple versions of the same album at different quality levels sold on other stores. Neil’s promise was, “If you bought it from Pono, you could be assured it was the best available.”
Neil also wanted every album’s resolution level to be clearly labeled and searchable. He also wanted to add much more high-res content by going directly to the artists, their managers, and the record companies, searching their archives and remastering existing masters. The goal was to offer much more high-res content than any other store.
PONO PROMISE
Neil and Franz Krachtus created the look and feel of the store’s design, and Neil provided several other innovative ideas. One of the most unique was “The Pono Promise.” This was a feature that encouraged customers not to delay their purchase of an album that might not currently be available in high resolution—more likely just at CD quality. If the customer purchased an album that later became available at a higher resolution, they’d be given the upgraded album at no cost.
This was a revolutionary idea and reflected Neil’s concern and respect for his fans. He was adamant that Pono users should not need to pay for the same performance a second time. We’d also use our relationship with our customers to report back to the record companies to let them know which recordings our customers wanted most in high res.
While we wanted the record labels to pick up this cost, they turned us down, so Pono paid for it. Neil was passionate about this issue, because buying the same performance time after time has been a part of the record labels’ operating model, which Neil knew really upset customers and reflected poorly on the artists. Music fans have been asked to purchase the same album multiple times with no consideration for past purchases. They bought it on vinyl, then on different tape formats, and finally on CD. Our store would only carry albums that were at minimum CD quality, 44.1/16, nothing lower. While that’s at the very low end of passable quality and not high res, sadly it’s the only format available for many albums.
DEVELOPING THE STORE
Developing the Pono music store was essentially creating iTunes for the Pono player in just six months. It was incredibly difficult and expensive to do and would end up costing millions of dollars. Pedram would need to identify partners who could meet our needs for the various aspects of the ecosystem, establish partnerships with each of them, and then manage all their activities with our internal team to create a state-of-the-art, seamless experience.
There were five main components that we needed: (1) the storefront, (2) the management of the music files and metadata (the information about each of the music files that accompany an album), (3) a payment processing service, (4) the desktop software used to manage our customers’ music library and to load their music onto the Pono player, and (5) the Pono player software. This would work like an app and include the user interface; the player settings, adjustments, and controls; and the music management.
Of these components, the only one that we would build from scratch was the Pono player software. If we were to deliver the rest on time, we had to rely on partners with expertise and existing products in each of the areas.
USING SALESFORCE TO POWER THE MUSIC STORE
Pedram started his research into the e-commerce platforms available to build the storefront. Unlike most online stores, which carry hundreds or thousands of products for sale, online music stores offer millions, and most e-commerce platforms can’t handle this well. After an exhaustive search, Pedram realized that none of the available platforms could meet our needs, and he’d need to find another solution.
Meanwhile, the Kickstarter community discussion board continued to remain active long after the Kickstarter campaign ended, and it became a hangout for music fans, where there were vibrant discussions about Pono, new music, and audio quality. That gave Pedram an idea of bringing this level of discussion into the music store, where customers could continue to interact with one another. He thought of using Salesforce, a popular cloud-based software development platform used to manage a business’s relationship with its customers, including customer support, a user community, and direct marketing. At their 2013 Dreamforce conference, he had seen their new Community Cloud product, which let companies connect to their customers to share information.
Pedram thought, Why not use Salesforce’s platform, Force.com, to build the music store?
But there was one big problem. Salesforce was a business-to-business platform, not the business-to-consumer platform that was required. This meant Pedram would need to build an online store from scratch or find someone who had already done it. He found a small company in Chicago, CloudCraze, that had such a platform and also aspired to integrate it with Community Cloud to deliver the experience he had envisioned. Pedram emailed CloudCraze’s CEO, Bill Loumpouidis, and heard back the next day. Bill was a die-hard Neil Young fan and jumped at the opportunity to build the user interface for buying music, checkout, and payment.
When Pedram proposed the idea of building a social music store on Salesforce to Neil and the Pono board at the next board meeting, it was well received, especially because of Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, who was a great friend of Neil’s.
While small companies such as ours cannot usually afford to use the Salesforce platform, Marc changed the Salesforce pricing model to accommodate Pono’s needs.
This partnership effectively turned Salesforce into a business-to-consumer platform, and Pedram believed it may have planted the seeds that eventually resulted in the Salesforce business-to-consumer services available today.
MANAGING THE MUSIC
Now that the social music-store technology had been found, the next step was to solve the challenge of storing, delivering, and managing the music content. There were really only a few companies who had experience with storing high-res music and had the licenses from the recording companies to do so. The leader in the space was Omnifone, a cloud-based music consumption service based in London. Pedram reached out to them and, once again, Neil’s name opened doors. Within a couple of weeks, we had an agreement for Omnifone to ingest all the high-res content available to Pono from the three major music labels, using software that connected to our music store and desktop applications.
Pono’s engineers worked with Omnifone for months to bring in the content, quality-check the music, tag the files with the resolution of the albums, and feed all this information into the Pono music store. In this process, we identified and solved numerous problems and inefficiencies in the whole end-to-end process with the music labels, benefitting all of Omnifone’s customers at the same time.
THE DESKTOP APPS
The last element we needed was the desktop software to deliver an iTunes-like experience. It would allow Pono users to download their purchased music, manage their music library, and load their music onto the Pono player.
Pedram contacted JRiver, a company that had built a desktop software app for Windows that was similar to iTunes but more complex because of its numerous features for technologists and audiophiles. JRiver’s CEO, Jim Hillegass, was also a Neil Young fan but was very skeptical of Pono and our odds of success. Nevertheless, he agreed to work with us to deliver a Pono-branded version of their desktop software for both Windows and Mac computers.
Altogether, building the store was a huge undertaking that involved close coordination between Pono, Salesforce, CloudCraze, Omnifone, and JRiver, as well as the record labels, while dealing with the inevitable technical issues that occurred with their integration.
I was skeptical that we’d be able to complete the store by the time we shipped the players. It was not that I doubted Pedram’s abilities—he was one of the smartest people I’ve worked with in this area. I just thought the magnitude and complexity of the work involving five different companies, all working in parallel, was filled with risks and obstacles.
Yet Pedram, the rest of the Pono engineering team, and these partners delivered just in time. We launched the Pono music store in beta in October 2014 at Salesforce’s Dreamforce event with all of the essential features. The following January, we released the 1.0 version at CES.