The panelists might be as well. If you want the Wi-Fi password, I'm going to give it out right now, so be at the ready if you need it. It is drama with capital D, then an all-caps deal with an exclamation point. So feel free to tweet and all that jazz. Also, we do one final panel tomorrow night, and that's back at the ranch at Samuel French, so please join us for that. And be sure to get a copy of our white paper on the way out, which has more information on anti-piracy. To kick it off, I'm going to turn it over to Sam French's lit manager, Amy Rose Marsh, and let's do it. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming to our third panel, which is on publishing your work, but it's an interesting panel because it's not, I think, what we'd conventionally think of as publishing your work. So we're not going to talk about, you know, Sam French, necessarily, or MTI, or R&H, or DPS. We're going to talk about how the Internet has kind of affected the publishing world and new platforms for digital script sharing. So what a playwright can do to get their script out there electronically and kind of new ways of communicating with theater enthusiasts about new plays. And with me, I have some very brilliant minds and very innovative minds that are kind of on the forefront of digital sharing, and I'd like to introduce them and read to some snippets of their bios. So over here to my right, we have Gwydian Sullivan, and he is the author of the playwright. He's the author of Butcher, Reels, Hot and Cold, Extract, Nude, Let X, The Faith, Killer, and Cracked. Gwydian lectures on theater and technology. He's the director of New Play Exchange. And you also work with National New Play Network. And he's also on the DC Representative for the Dramatist Guild, correct? That's alright. So he's here a lot. Recent engagements include South by Southwest, the Dramatist Guild National Conference, TEDx Michigan Avenue, and TEDx WDC, which I'm assuming is Washington DC. Yes, yes, yes. His commentary often appears on HowlRound in the Dramatist website, which is www.Sullivan.com. But you should look at your form because his last name is not how you think it would be spelled. And then next to Gwydian is Martin Denton. And Gwydian, all of you know Martin was the founder of a very influential theater review site, New York. And the theater.com. Yeah. And has recently launched a platform Indie Theater Now, which is an online publishing platform that exists digitally. We'll talk a little bit about it later. In addition, he's also edited 14 print anthologies. He's the founder of New York Theater Experience Podcast Series, which has been on the air since 2006. He's also received numerous awards, including a New York Innovative Theater Foundation Award and an Our Town Thanks You Award for a Service to the Manhattan Theater Community. Then next to him, we have a pair, Kate Kerrigan and Brian Lattermoak. Kerrigan and Lattermoak, who are a music theater duo. They're also the founders of NewMusicTheater.com, which, well, you'll talk about it, but it's for sheet music and digital exchange of sheet music. And they also have a number of shows, including Henry and Mudge. We're going to authorize Autobiography of Samantha Brown, Tales from the Bad Years, and Republic. And then lastly, we have Sean Patrick. Flav. Flav it. Thank you. Sure, you can pronounce his name correctly. Yeah. I practiced. Yeah, I practiced. So Sean Patrick is the senior vice president of Theater and Catalog Development and Chapel Music. He's a writer, composer, orchestrator, conductor, producer, and music publisher. He's a music administrator for Sondheim, Lopez, Kit and Yorkie, Miranda, and others. He also manages the song catalog of the majority of the Great American Songbook. Additionally, he serves on the board of the Music Publishers Association, the ASCAP S&C Committee, and the Dramas of Skilled Anti-Piracy Committee, and he had a wonderful article on howround.com today, which I encourage you all to go and read if you haven't already. It's great. And I hope you talk about some things that you wrote in that article earlier today. Sure. So I kind of want to talk, I briefly mentioned what you guys do or what your platforms are. And so I was hoping that we'd go around and you can give us a bit more of an in-depth introduction. Kind of where did these ideas generate from? How did this new play exchange started? And kind of what the goals of these digital script sharing services are? So, yeah, we can start with you. Sure. So the new play exchange is a new platform designed to transform the way plays and play rights, on the one hand, and producers, theaters, on the other hand, connect with each other. It is being developed by a consortium of nonprofits, the National New Play Network, Chicago Dramatists, Playwrights Foundation, Playwright Center in Minneapolis, and literary managers and dramaturgs of the Americas, and under the auspices of NNPN, the 70 theaters that make up the NNPN network. Essentially, it's a national database of new plays. Playwrights have one place on which they can upload their scripts and tag them with keywords and cast and genre and that sort of thing. And then it's a robust set of search and filtering tools that theaters and contests and et cetera can go to look for work. It's intended to replace the submission process, right? That's the old technology and we are upgrading it with the new play exchange. So you could talk a little bit about that upgrade. How is it? Yeah, so right now there are about 15,000 makers of new work in the United States, just for example, and they are making an average of one new piece a year. At the same time, there are about 1,500 world premieres every year in the United States and we have technology that filters 1,500 out of that 15,000 and that's the submission process and it's broken for everyone and we've tried to patch it with agents and submission windows and fees and contests, anything and everything we can do to kind of make it work and jury rig it and people still hate it. Nobody likes the 1,500 that end up on stage. Everyone's got pupils with it and literary managers and dramaturgs are sitting behind stacks of plays that are so heavy they can't see over them that I have to eat their lunch while they read and life is horrible. Playwrights are searching out there in the wild trying to find places to share their work and it's kind of a madness to keep up with where they're distributing their work and theaters are overwhelmed with the submission. They're not actually using the submission process to find work at all even if they keep their submission process open. They're actually finding new work by networking and relating to doing searches among their friends by emailing their contacts and their lists and that's the real way. So we wanted to say, hey, if that's the real way, let's use technology to enhance that real way and actually get playwrights connected to that process in a more holistic way. So we talked about the new play exchange as a neutral platform built for the common good of the American theater. And just to clarify, this is a platform that's open to all writers. All writers, yes. Well, right now we're in beta testing. So we're only open to writers affiliated with our partner organizations and theaters affiliated with our partner organizations. But we're actually looking to move up our time cable because people are like, let me in, let me in, let me in and we want to let people in. And so far the beta testing has been really smooth. There have been very few bugs so that we just want to open the doors quicker. So we're hoping to move up what was going to be a January open to the entire world to sometime earlier in the fall. Right. And so Martin, you have a similar, it is also an electronic script exchange in a way. In a way, yeah. Can you talk about kind of how Indie Theater now started and where the idea came from? Yeah, I loved you. So I'm the executive director of a nonprofit company called the New York Theater Experience. We've been around since 1999. And for the first 15 or so years, or maybe not quite 15, first 12 years or so of our existence, we were basically running a website called mytheater.com, which was a listings and reviews website focused on the New York theater community. And in particular, niching the Indie Theater world. We learned quickly that the productions, the artists and theater productions that didn't have budgets to be Broadway shows or off-Broadway shows were the ones that we would do the most good for. So we spent most of our time and resources over the years on mytheater.com, working with and promoting the work of these thousands of other artists who are in the Indie slash off-off-Broadway world. And at the same time, we had another project in our company, which was the annual plays and playwrights anthology, which started in 2000. And in that, we were able to publish about eight to ten plays every year from among the many, many plays that we saw every year. And at least, basically, our idea always was to be the point of first publication for emerging, interesting playwrights. So we were the first people to publish playwrights like Ken Urban and Queen Nguyen and Mike Lu and Savianas Tanescu and Jiora Miyagawa and this thing, you know, and 150 other people who, you know, I think it was, you know, it was a great start for their career. And we always made it a point not to publish more than one play by someone because it's so expensive and so costly to produce and market a book, a real book, that one a year was all we could manage. So as technology came along and internet evolved and life evolved, in around 2011, we had the idea to sort of marry our two skill sets and create this new website, which is called Indie Theater Now. So we're actually just two weeks away from our three weeks away from our third birthday. And Indie Theater Now basically combines our ability to publish plays, but we're doing it electronically so that instead of publishing eight plays a year by eight different playwrights in less than three years, we've published 955 plays by 596 playwrights. So we're able to get a great deal more work out in front of the public than we ever were able to afford to do in the print medium. In addition, the mytheater.com part of the expertise, which had to do with not only reviewing theater, but also interviewing playwrights and other artists and doing the podcast, as you mentioned, and a whole bunch of other things, profiling artists, so that we can provide background and context about all the work that we publish. And that still happens. So for example, we're about to start for the 13th year in a row to review every show in the New York International Fringe Festival, which is a great source of where we meet new playwrights. And we have a staff of about 100 amazing theater artists who have volunteered to help us do that kind of thing throughout the year, and we've been doing that, like I said, for 13 years. So M.D. Theater Now is sort of a marriage of the reporting and providing context and background and educating and exploring and helping people discover what's great in the theater scene, especially in the M.D. Theater community, and this idea of putting the work out on the internet, the scripts themselves so that people can read them for themselves.  Either I personally have seen the work of the playwright or someone already on the site has seen the work. So it's not an open submission process at this point. We think that's important because we want to make sure that we are able to maintain a level of quality that we understand. We do not give anything away on the site. Well, we give lots of free content away on the site, but we don't give away people's scripts because we think it's really important that the playwrights' work be valued. Even if they're a playwright whose work has never been published in a book, it's never been on Broadway, never been off Broadway, which is what just about all of our playwrights are. So we charge $1.29 or a little less for subscription plans per play, and playwrights get 30 cents every time that we sell one of their scripts, which admittedly is not a large amount of money, but it's something. And the playwrights, I think, really value the fact that they're getting checks, where before they weren't getting checks. So that's kind of cool. And one of the things that we're really encouraging is trying to build an audience, and this is the big challenge, is to get the word out about indie theater now and get people to understand what it is we're trying to accomplish for these folks who mostly don't have representation of any kind or mostly just starting their careers, or even mid-career people who haven't yet hit it, you know, and trying to get the word out so that people that are in positions to help those people with their career find out about their work, discover their work on the site. And we have had some success. But we have right now, I think probably what's arguably our biggest success today, which is a play called The Curing Room, which we actually published right when we started by a guy named David Ian Lee, who was a local playwright who has since moved to the Midwest because he's getting his MFA. And this is a play that he asked us to publish on the site. We were thrilled to do it. And he got a booking from someone who read it on our site. It's at the Edinburgh Fringe. It looks like it's going to be hit at the Edinburgh Fringe and it's booked for a tour in Britain after that. So this guy, who has never made any money as a writer, is making, you know, some money as a writer. And that's beautiful. And he's getting some renown. And we're selling copies of the script to other people as well, who are learning about the work. So I'm really excited about the fact that that's happened. And I know that there's two of our playwrights in the room, and I might be more, I just haven't seen you guys, but it's always nice to see them after I go. Are there three of them? Three? Are there three of them? Sorry. I want to find, so both, I'm assuming, and you guys are just dealing in plays or musicals? Plays and musicals, yeah. Plays and musicals. And do you represent musicals as well? I mean, we have musicals. It's hard. Musicals require other kinds of presentation that we're technologically able to do. So we do have some with, like, links to where you can find the music. Great. That's a good segue. Absolutely. It's a great segue. We've gone into newmusictheatre.com. New musical theater.com. New musical theater.com. And so can you guys talk for our audience that may have never been to the site or experienced the site? Just what is it? How did it start? Well, we actually, we started from a different place. Kate and I were specifically just setting out to solve some very specific personal problems we were having, which was professional problems. Professional personal problems. Professional personal problems. Namely that there were, it was a lovely problem to have, which was that people wanted to sing our songs and we wanted to allow them to do so. We had started out, I started out mailing people music and having them mail me $5 in the mail. And then the internet caught up. And then the internet got there and we started using PayPal and we would have people, and I would email someone. Someone would place an order via PayPal on our rudimentary website. There's probably, like, GeoCities or something. And then someone would, and we would send them the sheet music. Yeah. And everything sort of came to a head one, one Shabbat night when Brian was with his family. It was Passover and I was sitting down with my, and my phone just keeps ringing and I, like, answered the phone and someone's like, I can't get the sheet music to such and such. And they definitely thought they were talking to someone in the Philippines or something. Yeah, yeah.  But it's just me. And it was just Brian. And so Brian said, I'm happy, yes, I'm happy to get you your sheet music. I'll do it as soon as we finish dinner. And they said, wait, who am I speaking to? Like, well, this is Brian. There's no one else. And Brian Loudermouth called me. Who else would it be? So that was the moment when Brian came, came back to the city after his family shabbat. And he turned to me and he said, we have to find a new solution. There has to be something else. We have to do something else. This has to be electronic. So we started looking for platforms to make it electronic and find a way to sort of expedite the process of someone would like to buy our sheet music. We would like to give it to them in a PDF form. We would like that to be in a protected form. Yeah. And that was one of the biggest hurdles, was that we decided that we wanted it to be protected in some way. And so. We reached into our pockets. And we, which I can't believe we had the foresight to do, but like we did. And we worked with this lovely web programmer, tech guy named Scott Mevis. And we set about building a platform for our website. And we had very specific things we knew we wanted, such as a robust set of search criteria. We were coming from the place of let's assume that people knew enough to come here, but not enough to know what to do once they got here. Let's really lead people through and give them, we had the goal of promoting our back catalog in addition to the one or two songs that might have been driving traffic there. So we focused on those search criteria and we focused on a really simple encryption packet that's just based on, you know, we password protected with the credit card and we embedded with the name of the person who, we embedded with the name of the person who purchased it right on the music. Standard stuff, but kind of amazing that we could just do it ourselves. And around that time, we started to be aware of the fact that we were not alone in needing this. And we kept getting questions from other writers who were similarly positioned in their careers or just a little bit behind us in terms of audience. And they were asking us how to do what we were doing, which at the time was, you know, emailing a PDF to someone. We didn't have a good solution either. So as we started developing our solution to our own problem, we started looking at other writers who might also want the same problem solved. And we started with five other writers and teams. Bench Pasick came on, of the writing team, Pasick and Paul came on board with us at that point and his dad's a lawyer, so he helped us do that stuff. Yeah, and we started with six writers and rather quickly built up to like 30 and now we're like 50, somewhere around there. How do you make your decisions as to who's on the side? That has been a tricky thing to figure out because we learned all kinds of things in these first couple of years of having this business. Like A, we learned that it was a business. And B, we... We had to do accounting. Accounting, just very quickly. I remember in the first month having a conversation with Kurt Deutsch, who runs Shikaboo. And he thought we were adorable and we were talking about these things and he just said something to us about, I can't wait for your first accounting quarter. And we're like, what is he even talking about? And then we're like, Kurt, accounting! Yeah, but it turns out that it wasn't free to expand it to other writers and having writers on our site who don't sell content is actually a great cost to the site. Yeah, it doesn't effortlessly just expand. I'm probably saying something that's obvious to lots of people who are from the business side. We're just like, oh, we'll just have all of the people who write musicals be on this site. Which would be great if it was a not-for-profit, but our idea was that because we were coming out of everyone's place where we were saying, we as writers want to make money on this. We believe that this site should be something that is a for-profit. It's selling something. It's not just for the good of writers, but it's supposed to be for the good of writers. It's to sell your work. It's to say, I make a living, and we do make a living from our writing. And so I think that one of the things we've been trying to figure out is, we've been trying to sort of find that sweet spot between the commercial side of things and the artistic side of things. And that's true in our writing, and that's true in NewMusicalTheater.com, that you're always sort of trying to find that, you're trying to make sure that whatever you're putting on the site is sellable, but at the same time has artistic merit and it's sort of some sort of weird algorithm of that. That's kind of an interesting, because I want to talk to you, Sean Patrick, a little bit about the article you wrote today about monetizing content online. And so writers that aren't on NewMusicalTheater.com or don't have the beta code yet, there are ways to monetize putting your material online and kind of making sure it's protected. Can you talk a little bit to that and kind of what you recommend in terms of, if I was a new writer and had no agent and no idea what to do with my script, Yeah, there are a number of ways to do it. As the distribution channels have changed and broadened into a lot of different things, obviously we're not just selling discs via brick and mortar retail. In the same way that publishing rights have a number of components to them. You have a mechanical royalty component for selling a recording of your work, whether it's a download or a disc. You have a performance generally through ASCAP or VMI or CSAC. You have a synchronization if it's used in a film, TV, video game, advertising use, that sort of thing. And of course now there's all sorts of digital uses which sometimes cross over with those rights. You also have print rights, which for the theater world there's still quite a lot of value as they just talked about in having sheet music. It's the primary way that that music is transmitted from one to another because it generally involves ultimately a live performance. And so the digital sheets business has exploded, especially in the last few years. So I think for somebody who doesn't have representation or doesn't have a relationship with Brian Cater or any of the other sites, there are a number of ways to do it. Obviously you can put it entirely up for free and some people would advocate that. I think some young, early career writers are so eager to have their work done that they're willing to, you know, it's wonderful that somebody sings my song. The problem is once it's out there, especially once the sheet is out there for free, it's very, it's out the door and it's very difficult to shut the door later. So certainly I think it's okay to give away a little piece of it for free, as I said in the article, so that people know who you are because if it's entirely locked behind a paid system and you haven't, and literally no one knows who you are, you don't have a presence you're not known even in the theater world or the music world or what have you, you need to do your own marketing and so it's helpful to obviously have samples. I think probably the easiest way is to have streaming samples and if people like it, then they can buy it. You can do it. I don't advocate for any particular site or program because we're our own publisher as well, but there are a number of avenues you can do to pursue that. There's SoundCloud which will stream for free. There's Bandcamp where you can set either a specific price or a pay what you can price. There's Tunecore which lets you upload things to iTunes and Amazon and Spotify, all these sites. I recently looked and they've got some stores. Some of them aren't a pay to listen thing. A lot of them are streaming which do pay but in a different way. There's YouTube because the other thing that you didn't mention is that a lot of the ways that people knew to sing your songs at all is the YouTube videos of people singing your songs. They're beginning to perform all over the place but that's how they found out about it. They watch the video, they say and it's frankly the best indicator of whether or not she music is going to sell for us or other writers in our experience. The main metric we actually use when determining who should be on the site is YouTube views. Can I ask a sensitive question? On the panel, right? They said it's about personal problems. No problem. I'm just curious but I'm assuming that there are probably some less quality performances of your material online. That's a safe assumption. I didn't want to... I think it's safe to assume there are poor quality performances in your studio. Everything. Let it go. I think the Great American Songbook has taken some hits as well. It's rough out there. Are there values in those performances? Absolutely. There's certainly value to the performances and I think the contrast that I was trying to draw in the article that I wrote though was when it's the video that you're choosing to promote of your work. So if you have obviously a good quality performance even if it's a live performance, great. That tends to be you guys have lucked out on that in a lot of ways but a lot of people they think great so and so singing my song at this cabaret show. I should do it the video. I should put the video up. Maybe. Absolutely. Often in those cases you may get someone who's a prominent performer even to do it but they may not have had more than an hour's rehearsal and so no fault of their own it's not going to be that good. The question is is that the thing you should choose yourself in how to promote your work? Once the work is out there there can be any number of covers that are good, bad, and indifferent. We talk a lot about our digital footprint and we talk a lot about quality control in our work and in our site's work and there are times when we have a really tight gate on it and we never release all of the footage from our concerts we curate it and we really are careful with what we let out there and then we think there's absolutely a time when you want all hands on deck and there are times when we encourage all of our fans and all of our supporters everybody record a video but it's not necessarily being released through our channel directly there's a time to let it go into your computer screen but that's not necessarily something every morning but you're not necessarily going to charge to see that performance you're not necessarily... Disney is not going to say please record it all the times that you want to record it but we aren't going to put it on our website There's also a difference not to get into too much of the payment issue but there is a difference in YouTube depending on how you monetize it whether the video is something that you have officially put up in your channel versus some other user generated content and whether you opt in to different ad services that will place ads either around or in it that sort of thing so you can still make something off of someone recording it off their computer screen in the bedroom but you'll probably make more if it's on your official channel and you've opted in to the ad service and all that So Howard, I guess my question is as a publisher a traditional publisher who's dealing with the older pre-internet model where exposure to a new play was really kind of a theme by the book you go to a drawing book shop what are these new models changing relationships with that kind of traditional model do people need agents anymore is this getting more people agents are these getting like are there thoughts on that or well I'll just jump in I imagine people still need agents I'm the person on the panel and maybe one of the few in the room who doesn't make a living as a theater artist writer we're solely we run a non-profit company so I've never had the problem of trying to get an agent but my sense from talking to other people is that agents seem to be important to people I think that we've always viewed our mission as trying to sort of be the entry point for we always kind of joke that we haven't invited Tony Kushner to be on indie theater now if he wants to be on it, he's welcome we're not looking to service people that have reached a level of stature in their career, we're trying to help people at the beginning when you talk about the relationship between digital publishing and traditional print publishing we concluded as a company who pretty much have stopped being a print publisher as of I think the last anthology we published which was one we did earlier this year is that just it just doesn't make sense from a money standpoint to print publishing for new work new work of the kind that we focus on I'm going to be very clear about that I'm positive it makes sense to publish the works of Shakespeare I'm positive it makes sense to publish the works of Jordan Wilder and many many other wonderful established playwrights but I'm also positive that there's no money to be made publishing the works of undiscovered unrepresented playwrights which is why we're a non-profit trying to use our resources to get those people to a place in their career I feel like I'm sort of rambling but that is No, I mean do you have thoughts because I know you guys New Play Exchange has been doing seminars can I call them seminars? Yeah, some of them have been seminar-like Yeah, some of them are like There's a couple in this very room We're meeting with theater professionals around the country either in identity groups so all the world's literary managers and dramaturgs in one room playwrights in another room and then lots of mixed groups as well and we did convene one gathering of agents here in New York including my own so I walked down the hall from meeting with her and brought her with me and gathered 30 others in a room and told them all about the new play exchange and we are not putting any agent out of business anytime soon or ever I think they feel and we agree that our tool is going to be incredibly useful for them it's just a new way for people to find their client's work and when they find their client's work having found it with a particular mindset that I was looking for exactly this kind of thing and here it is and here's my content information, here's my representatives phone number and email address so that I can immediately reach out and make a connection they think it's going to be a tool for that elusive second production for their clients which is great and I hope it is is the goal to have people I mean do you think agents will one day use this to discover new writers it's possible it really is possible we are in such a place now of experimentation and learning and beta testing and I've built technology now for a couple of decades I've acquired a healthy humility about what it is to release a new platform into the wild the world is going to teach me about what we did and say yeah you know what look what you did here, you didn't think you were doing this but you did and there'll be unintended consequences and things we're going to have to learn from and adapt to so I'm 100% certain we're not going to put agents out of business what might actually happen is agents say you know what this feature particularly useful in this way you hadn't considered can you tweak it this way and that way so I can really use it and then we'll be like great awesome our intent is to serve the American theater and so if it's useful for folks that's what we want to do we're a non-profit as well we're not out to make a buck we're out to serve do you guys have thoughts on how it's changing relationship? I mean the thing that I feel lately you can totally correct me is that it's a very strange sensation of having this like having all of these direct connections with people who want to perform our work we have like a global network of people in the Philippines who just want to sing our songs and we have actors in the Midwest and lots and lots of students who want to do our work and we don't really have relationships with people who run those programs we don't have relationships with small theaters and like we make a living as writers not like a great living but like Kate and I are professional writers and yet like a lot of those normal first routes to like who would be the first line of people you have a business relationship with are not at all who our relationships are with and there have been some repercussions to that and we're trying to it's something that we're now actively trying to figure out how to then have relationships with these especially like very small theaters and very small like all your students like us how do you like you're not necessarily on the internet that's not connected to your agent exactly because your agent is connected to the more professional side of your career and that's sort of so it's almost for us it's been a little bit bisected and I think a lot of the people who are in at least a musical theater I don't know as much with plays I think that because musical theater has a very commercial bent to it at least a little bit there's a lot of us who are the way that we figured out that we can make our living is to be connecting with people who are buying sheet music from us and that puts us in a really interesting position over here and it almost feels completely disconnected from our actual like the professional trajectory of the new shows that we're trying to write the songs are from those new shows we're theater artists we are we swear it's a weird thing it takes a really long time to get a show produced and so you end up doing this thing on the side over here and most of our friends most of the people who are writing or are contemporaries are doing the exact same thing I should have actually cleared this early on but none of these platforms can bar you from traditional publishing and licensing relations it was very important to us as we set it up for instance I have some writer clients who I publish and we have a deal with theater.com so that they can sell their music via their site as well as all the other places we license their music to I would say about the agent relationship there's sort of three primary functions that an agent or a publisher has or at least a front line publisher one is finding the talent one is promoting the work and one is making the deal and I think the value of these sorts of services are helping to find the talent and helping to promote it to some extent it's not obviously doing the deal and when you have a situation where you get an actual production opportunity particularly with a professional theater it's very important to have somebody to help you make that deal whether it's an experienced lawyer in the theater world or an agent or someone so that as the drama skill always says don't sign or anyone don't sign anything and having somebody smarter than you look at it or at least smarter than you in a different way so I think the music business has obviously used online services to try and find talent as well a lot of record labels in particular have people who spend a lot of time I've seen some of these rooms where it's pretty amazing and they spend all day on YouTube and blogs and other stuff scouting or artist talent sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't there are a number of people who have huge YouTube or online followings tens of hundreds of millions of hits on multiple videos they tend to be performers in their late teens early 20s while they sing covers of pop songs and so they have these fan bases some of them tour and make a lot of money selling concert tickets they're not touring arenas but they're touring decent venues there have been not very many situations where that sort of thing has translated into recording income or publishing income partly because they're doing covers but even when they start some of them start to do their own material and then there's still a following but not as much so I'm not putting it down I think it's great to be out there and a lot of the videos are very high quality but I only know a handful who have translated that into the kind of income that would sustain them just from sort of an online presence kind of thing I think the income that you make from your songs whether it's sheet music or videos or what have you for a theater writer is great it can be very lucrative certainly but of course it's a much better thing to get a production of your work because royalty wise you're obviously going to make a lot more and career wise you're going to progress more than that that's segues we're having good organic flow but I also want to bring because when I've been to these convenings or you know I talk to a lot of writers and we talk about should I do this, should I not do this what does this mean and I think there still is a a vibe or a question in people's mind about the security of these platforms you guys had mentioned this large fan base but not necessarily being able to access the theaters you know what does that mean in terms of protection of your material and how do you I mean is that something that the theater has to take on themselves in terms of the sheet music that we saw on the site you are able to download the you're able to download the sheet music but as a customer you're able to download the sheet music but in order to open the file you have to put your you have to put a password in and the password is your credit card information so you might share that with most of the more teenagers you might share that with your mom but you're probably not going to share it with anyone else it probably was your mom and then even if you even if you did share that you could then once you open the file the file has your name watermarked on the sheet music so you could totally work around that there are very like really even very like analog solutions that are coming around that we won't discuss that because I don't want to talk about that but there are things that make it very hard to share it to pirate the music you can set up barriers to that there's very few foolproof kinds of things and even iTunes and Amazon did away with the DRM on their tracks that they sell a little while ago I believe there's still fairly heavy DRM you need to find DRM so it's the kind of thing that almost everybody doesn't like who isn't in the we like it basically you're just making it really inconvenient to another sites have like you can print it only once or other sites have it self-destructs and that's part of it for us and another part of it is advocacy and the third part that we also talk about making sure that things that people want are available at all because that's one of the largest drivers of piracy as far as we're concerned so we think that like in general it's great that like we're all just making things available that people should want or in some cases that we think they should want but like there's kind of we sit on a piracy committee here at the DRM at a scale with Sean and with some other writers that's led by Craig Carnelia and did a piracy what was it called? a blast we did a pirate blast here in this very room a couple months ago and it's been wonderful we spend a lot of time sitting around and talking about both the DRM side of it but mostly about the advocacy side and really talking about the fact that if we have the expectation and we're not even teenagers that if I look on the internet basically teenagers but if I look around the internet for something I expect to be able to find it and if I can't I get frustrated very quickly and so if I if you can't buy something and you want to be able to access it even as I teach a libretto writing course there's nothing that's harder to find anywhere than librettos and so I end up emailing writers and asking to borrow their libretto and telling them that I'm going to make a couple photo copies of my students to look at hard copies of but like I'm doing they're saying it's okay but I really wish that wasn't the way that I had to do it I should just tell my students to buy this libretto which I would totally do but I can't because it's not available on the internet for the most part so that's it's hard it's confusing Do you feel like you probably addressed the security question in your seminars in my seminars the writers we've been meeting with around the country and I probably met feels like a thousand now at this point they're mostly playwrights rather than musical theater writers they I talk a lot about people my age and above are really concerned about privacy and they don't want the script available and we've set up the new play exchange so that you can create an entry for your play and not add the script you can add a little sample you can add a synopsis you can add the information about the script and then require someone to contact you if they want to read it and people younger than me are like put the script up there and these are represented people and unrepresented people they just they information wants to be free if there's an unlicensed production of their work in Zaire, great, they don't care you know in the age of the Google alert about your work when you can have that set that up you're always going to find out about anything just be savvy and be smart and so I personally my emotionally I can see both perspectives and I live right in that vague center I tend to side with the younger folk but I totally see the other perspective and if you look at my profile in the new play exchange you'll see there's about half and half of my audience the published work is not there because I would not do a disservice to my publisher by putting a free accessible copy of it up there the unpublished work some of it is up there and some of it isn't and it's really about what I'm feeling like you know it's not logic sorry to is there some concern about what you put online being the finished edition I know we wrestle with that question at French because you know a lot of playwrights these days but then historically go back and kind of change the work as they see new productions or you know we have plays that mention My Space we have a rule always that playwrights can revise the work I mean not every week but you know certainly we're happy to put up new versions as the plays develop and I've actually been you know I think maybe not too high pressure but trying to encourage people to put work up even you know as it's just being performed for the first time so that it gets the exposure and one of the things we can talk about this before but it's called Indie Theatre Now for a very specific reason and that is that we're publishing plays as they're being presented for the first time so like there is a play that opened it opens I guess tonight at the Midtown International Theatre Festival not a famous venue but a real one and that play is published on Indie Theatre Now it's a world premiere of the play and I know he wants to revise it after he sees the first run and he will and that's great but at least the work is available for people to see in fact this guy already got a production written from the work that's on our site so the idea works I wanted to also just talk about what he was just talking about too because it's really important to me and that's this idea of making sure that the work is secure and is safe and I mean I'm very much a firm believer in the rights of any creator to be able to profit from their work I do not I get mad at the New York Times that it wants to charge me to read their articles but they're right what they did wrong was give the way for free for a really long time so that I'm mad now if they'd always charge me I wouldn't because they used to charge me so Indie Theatre Now is set up right from the start to be protected in its own way of the rights of these playwrights we have a proprietary reader that we developed that is meant to be a reader of the play so it is not an acting copy by any means of the play you could fashion print screens and cobble together an acting copy of the thing but that would be really a lot of work I mean you could do it but it would be a lot of work I would be smarter to contact the playwright and try to work something out with the playwright and we provide all that contact information on the site we chose the iTunes pricing model that's why the play is called $1.29 it was not a guess it was the iTunes price because our thought was that our main market is probably younger people and especially kids in schools because that's really our main market or people who read these plays in colleges and they think nothing of spending $1.29 for a sign work or for work they're going to use for their own purposes and we've got one of our absolute best selling play is a play by a guy who teaches in this area and he teaches a course in theatre at a number of schools in the New York City area and he charged and he always used to give his play away to and now he gets 30 cents every time one of the students buy it and we all will buy it because it's only $1.29 and we can always tell when he's teaching it because they'll be getting at least like 17 copies of the play because the kids don't buy it in advance that's for sure I think it's really important to protect we've met with a number of groups of playwrights I'm sorry if I'm going on too long but we've met with a number of group of playwrights and what I hear from the folks we talk to and it's not really so much age related it's just what we give them everybody that we work with is happy to let people have a reading copy of the play for the $1.29 but almost no one that we work with wants a PDF out there they don't want a printable, usable, actable copy they want that to be theirs to control and as we don't do licensing we're not interested in getting into that business you know that is great with us but you know it does limit in a way some of the usability of what we're doing on the site but again our purpose is to introduce the word to anybody can I ask a question can you read it on the tablet you can read it on anything that can connect to the internet so it's not that you have to sit and read it on the screen of your mind no you can read it on your phone but what you have to be is connected because you can't download it you can't read it on the subway unless you're really lucky they live in DC where we have I have one more question and I want to turn it over to everyone for larger questions but for those of you that are artists as well as digital innovators how does this work with an author's own website I'm assuming that you have your own websites and then you're also using these other platforms does that become cumbersome do you find that you get more traffic to your website from other platforms do you recommend that playwrights have multiple accounts with various as many accounts as possible or is it about I don't know I don't know we have newmusicaltheater.com which brings in very different people and different people might find our work because of that because they're looking for another artist's work and that's great being on YouTube our YouTube account is one of our biggest ways that people find us and that happens through probably through Google sometimes it's just through YouTube and then it's people who are subscribers of our page and then we have a website which there are moments where I wonder whether or not that's actually worthwhile given all of the different platforms that people now use but we made our website something that is sort of its own beast and has its own identity we keep all of our lyrics for all of our songs on our website and we house them there and so that's something that we know that people are looking for so we know that people will go to our website for certain things and so it seems useful but we can help a lot we have a front row seat from our Purchot New Musical Theatre and so we can't help but translate the best practices we figure out over there to our own work and so when we went about finally fixing our website last year it was, if you searched for us it came up as Kentucky off track betting because something's happened and we couldn't fix it and it was really interesting we looked at our Google Analytics which I recommend everybody install because it's free and simple and we were like oh wow everyone just wants the lyrics to our songs this is the way they're finding us and so we just put all our lyrics up on our site but at least they're not somebody else who's getting the traffic and so we put it up on us and they're active and when they change we update them and I did want the chance to respond to your last question I just want to say that I've gotten so accustomed to changing my work at Will and we have three different versions of some of our songs online because it's really hard, people don't want you to take away their old one they really liked the old one that you didn't like very much that had the really bad what are you going to do we leave that up there but we actually even call it like preferred version like retired version don't sing this song but hear fine because you it's a weird thing to think about the first time we're in physical print we talk about but that's a weird thing we just can't just change it when we want to I don't know do you have writers we're going to be awful to deal with when we have a print if we have a print deal if books aren't just all gone because I want to be able to change it all the print publishers Alfred and Hal Leder now have digital print services where it's not quite it's more than print on demand but they can do very small quantities of a very nice looking book it's almost indistinguishable from what you would buy if they made ten thousand of them but for even though sheet music is very popular for theater still, physical sheet music it's not as big a business as it used to be and so the marketability of let's say vocal selections fully of an off-broadway show that's closed is limited and so but that's how to say we shouldn't have it there so we always put the songs up digitally for individual sale where there's a number of different sites and we also try and make it so that it's available so if there is a marked demand for it then they can make a hundred of them and they don't need to have the same print run press buy because as I think Mark was saying the cost of paper and binding and all of that is just prohibitive in many cases so the other question you were asking about websites so I always encourage the writers I represent particularly the younger ones to have a website to have it look at least basic and decent and to have a consistent name for the domain name and their twitter handle and their youtube channel and their facebook if they have a profession you know a fan page or whatever so that people always know no matter how they're going at it they're always finding that person you know the and then of course there are links on there to purchase their music in many different ways from many different sites I have an example well it's interesting though what you were saying about the website I think different people have different things like I represent LeMau Maranda who has a huge social media following mainly because he's very active on it he's on there many times a day and so he did this 15 minute musical for Ira Glass on This American Life a few weeks ago and it was performed live at BAM and they did a video and they sold the video on This American Life website Ira Glass and Lynn emailed me and said we're going to go into the studio the day after they shot the thing they went into a studio and recorded the cast album EP of five tracks of this 15 minute show the video is great I encourage everyone to buy the video the album is also great the audio quality on the album is better than it is in the video because they had time in the studio to do it we published his songs he wanted to self release the audio it was too short a timetable to get a label involved in that sense because it was three days but we got it up on iTunes in three days on Amazon and it debuted at number 10 on the cast albums chart because he tweeted it and he has 57,000 twitter followers and that's where they found it they didn't follow it by going to his website I mean, I consult for arts organizations and artists about digital communication strategy and I think at this point we're living in a world where having a competent website is tantamount to what having a competent CV was about a decade or a generation ago you kind of have to and it's really not that hard it requires maybe a mental leap to decide that you can do it but you can do it you can do it for 100 bucks and a lost weekend and you have to drink while you're doing it? you do it or you can hire somebody fancy to do it for you but it's just do it yourself having said that I think it's important to not get overwhelmed I tell the artist that I work with to pick a channel and go deep rather than try and do nine channels shallowly or pick three channels and go deep my channel as many of you know is twitter and I spend a lot of time there and I've got a following there and it's worked for me and I also have a rather robust website because I can't not and I also play around with a new platform that comes up because I have to know them but I can't devote my life to that I really have to make the work and that's important too so I'm going to turn it over to the audience let's start you raised your hand first the mint gentleman in the white hat destiny I want to say that I appreciate the work you guys are doing the world is going in technology direction a lot of people want to be sites that only read the terms of conditions or regulations but it's usually a clause that they're granting the site a particular right and if it's not there it should be there because someone could come around later on and so you know they didn't take their work down my question is what repercussions does that have for the person who's posting your work on your site? so this is a question about perpetual rights and what repercussions do they have for people posting your work basically the way we do it is the player has the right to take the work down any time they want after it's been up for six months we ask them to give it six months because there's a certain amount of investment that we've made so the players can take the piece down for any reason no questions asked the only condition is that anybody who's purchased one of their digital plays for $1.29 gets to keep the play forever but other than that the play's gone so I think that's pretty fair I don't ask for perpetual rights at all artists can take it down six seconds after they put it up what if they don't and there's great great grants what are you asking what are the future situations where your grandfathers work on your site for protection like I said there is value to that of course well we're not making any money off of it so there's not we don't need protection we have an agreement we have signed agreements not digital but actual real signed agreements with every single playwright so if the grandson asks us a question we can show them the agreement but is that something for writers to be mindful I guess as they explore the terms of the in our case the writers that we represent they have an agreement with Warner Chapel or as you would with any other publisher and that has either a certain term it can be three years it can be life and copyright and then wherever that work appears is a license between the publisher and that site so that license can be usually for a fixed amount of time if a writer in most I think in most of our agreements I shouldn't say all because I don't know for sure but I know in a lot of them that I deal with if a writer doesn't want their work on a site we usually have the right to pull it off if for whatever reason sometimes they want to revise it sometimes they want to who knows some people don't want their work on certain sites because they don't like the deal terms they don't like the site itself who knows but usually I don't think I'm not sure websites are going to be around in their current form and the question is sites like Wattpad have a writer's copy they have that so they have the perpetual right to keep it up I wouldn't load my work there at all but I think that's also because I mean Martin you've been a major advocate but for the rest of us we're also writers and so of course from the very outset that was a non-starter there just had to be something in it that was the New Musical Theater is a for-profit company that's mostly trying to make a living or a supplemental living for a lot of its writers but regardless there's a writer friendly thing that's happening underneath it and there's something about it that that's paramount is the right to take that work down and to be in control of it I'm sorry but a related thing that I've been hearing from various playwrights that I find very concerning is people saying that they're online publishers are requiring an exclusive arrangement and if I were a playwright I would not let anyone in the world have exclusive rights but that was our that's like the birthright I pass on to my children but that was exactly because we were writers when we were creating the agreement for this company and other writers that we were also signing so there was that sense that it had to be something that is non-exclusive that was not to sound like a paid program for the drama to skill writers who are represented or don't have a publisher to go back to and talk about these issues I mean if any of you do have agents publishers you know ask them before you post on the website definitely will help you out but you do not, I mean the drama to skill is also a wonderful resource and join them and run it by them say hey I found this I was just looking over terms and conditions what does this mean should I post and I think that you know they're a wonderful resource to kind of walk you through that that pops up and says asks us is it okay if we put this there and sometimes we already have an agreement with that site so then we contact the site and say please put this person's stuff up so it's great you had a question too in the front row yes I had a question regarding you know an interface that could be built and this is just a question to see how viable or what other people have to utilize this an interface that when the person goes to download the PDF whether it be sheet music, whether it be play I'm not necessarily talking about recording music in this instance but a pop up that basically you know you would read by downloading this that the terms are X like for example you will not sell this or you will not this is for purchase of an individual copy is that something that would apply we have that built into the terms of conditions for anyone who signs into the play exchange in a way when you were talking about the idea of the water market I mean if someone signs the terms of conditions it doesn't inhibit them from sending a PDF to China but it does make it something that they shouldn't have done we told so many signs it's okay and even if we don't tell them that they can't do it yes it will be gone it's what we do in the laws of the country yes so I just mean in terms of all the platforms that we're talking about that's something that's consistent to all of them so any kind of a platform like that that's still it's always illegal people just make photocopies of plays on time that's what we will do historically that was the equivalent I think is the photocopy happen do we have a twitter? yeah we have a lot of questions I think I'm having a twitter no don't worry the internet has questions the internet has so many questions so I have a couple here maybe I can throw out two of them the first one is let me see here do any of the panelists appear plan to push into licensing no what's licensing it like we're talking about grant rights licensing license it all works I don't know what other thing it's complicated certainly for the major licensing houses it's shifting it's changing it's becoming digital we sell 90% of our scores you can buy almost the entire score there's not much left it's just like some underscoring and then a pdf of the script which I guess they could get over on the other tables so it really becomes what we're no it doesn't but I'm saying that barrier to entry in that world is not so far away and so then it becomes all about the relationship between the licensor and the theaters and for great licensors there's a history and certainly it's something that Sam French does which is to like really curate those relationships there's something that is more than just the sheer act of passing on materials but that's a it's a weird thing and it's now something that I imagine for Amy is sitting up here can probably speak to it but that's something that I imagine is shifting and that relationship between theaters and licensing houses is also becoming a digital one oh yeah I think Sam French has seen major innovations of how we handle music materials and our theaters you know I think I'm not that I want to become a panelist but you know we also entered into e-plays and a lot of that was and I can say as also a literary manager as well as a French employee the days of those scripts on desk and you're eating your lunch and softly crying on the script you know it just became about going back actually I just wanted to digital scripts and so you know we're kind of answering these demands as we you know Warner Chapel doesn't license we license grand rights for usually pre-existing songs that are not theaters so for instance we did American Idiot because we represent Green Day we have songs in Rock of Ages and Lady Day and a number of other things like that in the UK and Europe we do have a stock and amateur grand rights licensing for some musicals but generally we work in partnership with Senator French and MTI and the other licensing houses to handle grand rights Courtney did you have another solid one? Yeah I have one more Danica Kelly who's asking are there any downfalls to publishing on an online platform instead of your print so it has been a lot of online is awesome so now the question is what would be the downfalls of online and not print? Are there any pitfalls in your own personal experiences and your histories with these that you didn't anticipate? Well I mean this is the worst thing for me to say but I hate to read plays online I'd much rather read a book but I'm 53 years old and I'm used to reading plays and books and so it doesn't really matter what I think because kids that aren't used to reading books that's who we're really building this for I think that's a downfall but I think that the feel of books is something that a lot of people miss I mean there are certainly people that we have not been able to sell plays to because they can't read it as a book and I remember we got somebody said you're probably really nice people and this play is really good and I won't buy it because I can't read it in my computer I don't know that there's another downfall I mean honestly I think that it would be crazy for us to put our heads in the sand and say that digital presentation of work is not the trend it's not even just the trend it's like it is so it's the way that people are going to be receiving work and I think the important thing is to make sure that the same respect and care and love that was that creating a book made you do because it was hard it's really easy to publish stuff online I can publish a blog post in like three minutes and I don't feel like it's proof it so much the worth makes much and you should these things these plays are beautiful works of art and they must all be we must guard against thinking that this is some kind of factory oh I can publish 20 billion of these in a week no we can't we have to take our time with them and we have to treat them with love and as long as we do that then the digital platform is only a great thing because it's putting the work out like I said we were able to publish almost a thousand plays in the time it would have taken us to publish about 20 and really for way less actual cash out the door I mean so isn't that great isn't it great that we're able to get this work in front of people who wouldn't have ever had an opportunity to see it again as long and you know and I just what I'd say great pride in what we do we do everything by hand as much as we can in this digital world and I personally added every script and you know that's I don't see it down some yeah the new play exchange is not a publisher so this is my answer as as an author I'm wary of books I trust books books are fixed and done and unchanging but a digital book can change and can grow and can morph I love the idea that a book could be published and then a new edition could come out in a week when I find a typo or when I decide a new reference is better I love that you can put out new versions of your songs whenever you feel like it I love that your art is a living thing I think that's that is the future you know it doesn't mean that I didn't put thousands of hours into writing that first draft and plenty of care and love into it but this artificial stopping point for a piece of art that's meant to live in a room with other people there called publishing and that artificial stopping point I just don't trust it creates a kind of fake snapshot of the work and I'm saying this is someone who's been published and has work in print and I just am always really like I sidle up to it carefully I don't think we should stop I would say that the negative is that I mean I think there are there's a plethora of positives but the negative is that there is a gap in accessibility that exists especially right now and certainly we end up in situations where we're dealing with customer service where someone who's the head of a theater program in the Midwest and wants to put their new musical theater the new musical theater song book in their library and we don't really have a good way to help them do that and that's really frustrating for them and it's really frustrating for us because we want nothing more than to be a part of that canon and to be a part of what is considered to be theater right now like theater now and the things that people are giving things to sing and so it ends up being I think that access the more platforms you can have your work on the more access people can have to your work and so I think that for me as someone who also loves to read things in my hands I find that when there's the possibility of having multiple platforms when there's the possibility of having something physical and having something that's digital I don't think they cancel each other out and right now especially when there's an enormous transition and we don't know exactly where we're going to land I think that's really important I want to say the thing that for me is both like an enormous positive and also the thing I'm most scared of in the publishing world in general which is that the year that we founded the musical theater was that first year that Amazon was getting in a price war with e-book publishers back in like 2009 and like to now be sitting here whether in the war with Hatchet the thing that was absolutely terrifying to me in the background of all the really logical reasons that we started the musical theater was this intense fear that if we didn't do something Kate and I to like specifically create a method to sell our work ourselves and to protect 100% of our rights someone was going to come in very quickly and like destroy the world and collapse everything and do what happened in the record industry 15 years ago and that like it was just going to be smoke and ash everywhere it really I was terrified in 2009 and so in 2008 we just acted really quickly and in our self-interest and I have been really happy to see that our industry moves at a glacial rate in regards to technology it's been like a really lovely thing to just watch as like as there is smoke and ash everywhere in industries like ours but it's like we're so small shhh internet leave us alone like it's like we've been small enough so as to like stay under the radar and keep a lot of our revenue streams intact and I just like I'm so terrified still there's still part of me that is a bit of a technophobe that like that deals with all of this and like works on all of it in the hope that like no one's going to burn the place to the ground so I just like hope that people who love theater will continue to like be at the helm of for-profits and non-profits and all kinds of new emerging companies that are built with you know writers and and writers rights in mind because the alternative is freaking horrifying because people ask us when we started and ask us still now would you put your plays on Kindle and wouldn't they sell really well if it was on Kindle wouldn't that be a great thing and I guess it might be a great thing but the problem is as soon as I put you on Kindle then your play is it's not even just Amazon's fault it's that your play which right now is one of 955 plays and that's all they are it's plays your play on Kindle is now one of you know 22 billion things that Amazon sells and as soon as I look at your play or your play you're cooking oh look playboy oh look this oh look a video and I don't want my audience to go away I don't want my audience to stay right here so I think we have the same kind of very proprietary and that's people that make theater tend to be very independent souls thank god I want to wrap this up because I know I think Brian and Kate do need to be out the door but I think a great question to kind of end this wonderful panel and I thank you guys all so much because I think this has been informative there's lots of great quotes and talking point where do you hope your platforms go in the future what is the vision like ten years down the road and this is a huge question to end on sorry where do you see digital publishing in ten years I would very much like for the new play exchange to become two things in ten years one is the digital infrastructure that supports the backbone of the American the new play sector of the American theater and also an archive of the last of the previous ten years of work that has been done in the American theater I think most practically I would love to see a sooner than ten years be self sustaining so that we don't have to keep begging donors for money to keep us alive and I think that's a very possible thing to do and I would love to actually what William just said sounds good to me too I think that I don't know if we'd be the backbone but I think that we could be a really important contributor to keeping providing discovery of new work and mainly conversation about new work I mean discovery and conversation and exploration are really the key goals so that people can not just find new plays for school for production, for pleasure but also hopefully almost be kind of a Facebooky kind of community where it's really discussed in an intelligent and supportive and generous way That's what I think of Facebook when I think of Facebook and supportive and generous and intelligent for I don't know for new musical theater I think we're our goal has from the beginning been to create to have a platform for writers to make a living and we're constantly looking for ways to help the writers do that better and to create a situation where the site is the site is helping the writers do that better not just through advice but how the actual site works so that there's more people coming to the site that we're using the site in a way that people can find things and that people are finding new writing and that they're looking for new writing is something that's really important to us and not necessarily the easiest thing to get new writing to do because they like what they know so I think that's a big part of it for me I don't know if you have anything to add That's a good answer. I hope that there are lots of things about the site that like ten years from now I wouldn't even recognize I hope it's all kinds of things that I can't even imagine But also no smoke Yeah, no smoke, no fire Yeah The future their iPads No paper No, I think there's always going to be some market for some form of high-end audio and maybe some form of vinyl or nostalgic media Obviously digital downloads have now surpassed physical sales permanent digital downloads and streaming services around the rise were very much more the entire music industry is much more nimble than it was 12 years ago, 15 years ago certainly making deals with licensing deals with all sorts of companies I think the hope is that people will actually pay the subscription fees for the streaming services because the monetization to the songwriters and the recording artists is much greater if the song is streamed by a subscriber than it is for a free customer when it's just an ad supported model and that's true of almost all the services and I think history is born out that people are willing to pay for access if they have a system that they like that's easy to use and has a wide variety of things to choose from So there are any number of competing services now, I don't know I'm not going to try and predict which will be most successful but my guess is that it's still going to be some combination of old media downloads and streaming Thank you so much I know you guys have a good time Thank you guys so much This was fantastic Thank you, you're running out, y'all were awesome but yeah feel free to stick around for a few more questions and just a reminder that tomorrow is our final panel at Samuel French and we have a fun little thing after so please come 6.30 and it's a catch up, high or see the digital age who knows what we discussed so please join us Thank you so much You're welcome Thank you


Would you rather fight 50 duck-sized mummies or one mummy-sized duck? Oh, definitely I wouldn't like 50 small ones. That would freak me out, I think, for sure. I can take down one big one.  Well, I need some...  And you'll already have to bow an arrow as well. Yeah, exactly. Would you rather spend one night alone in a spooky tomb or a week there but with your mates? Oh, a week with my mates, for sure. Yeah, then we can take turns and sleep and, yeah, totally. Would you rather have Lara's skills in boxing or cycling? Boxing. Would you rather go on vacation to Croft Manor or Wayne Manor? No, I'll definitely go for Croft Manor, yeah. I think there's more secret tunnels in Croft Manor. Yeah, I think so too. From the earlier games, her butler, too. So I think he'll take care of me, hopefully, if I come. Would you lock him in the fridge? I was just thinking that if he's naughty, yes.


Enter the revenue service to IRS tax news. IRS appeals revises initial contact letters as part of effort to enhance the taxpayer experience. Improve the initial contact letter from the IRS. Honestly, it's like a thief trying to improve his introduction before stealing your money. We're going to make that initial contact letter so nice, says the IRS. You'll love it when we take your money. It'll be like sweet poetry in that initial contact letter. Dear taxpayer, how do we love thee? Let me count the ways. And then, when we're done counting, we'll sum up the total so you can send us a check. But first an attempt at a joke.  Sorry sir, doing my best. Who made that man a gunner? I did sir.  The economy? I think he's dead. Is he dead? Is he finally dead? Can I go free? Or maybe it's a herd. No, he's a woman now. I mean, I'm not even sure if there's a difference anymore, but what should I do 911? What should I do? Biden is told by 911 to first put the phone down and make sure he, the economy, is really dead. Is he dead? It's hard to say. Biden puts the phone down and the receptionist hears a series of thuds. Oh, I can't make out a heartbeat. Biden gets back on the phone explaining, I saw the man, the economy move just a little bit. No, look, he's breathing. So, I whacked him on the head with a baseball bat, repeatedly. Who is he?  I know that. What's his name? That is his name, sir.   I mean, what should I do 911?  So like, I could really make sure he, the economy, is totally dead. How many assholes we got on this ship anyhow? Yo! I knew it.  IR 2022-170, October 4th, 2022, Washington. The Internal Revenue Service Independent Office of Appeals is taking important steps to improve how taxpayers interact and communicate with the IRS by revising their initial contact letters. Quote, Appeals resolves federal tax disputes without litigation in a way that is fair and impartial to taxpayers and the government. In quote, said April Adams Johnson, the senior level advisor to the Chief of Appeals and Appeals First Taxpayer Experience Officer. Quite the title right there. Quote, typically at the start of the process, the Appeals Officer assigned the case sends a letter with some introductory information and invites the taxpayer or their representative to a conference. We want this letter to be clear and easy to understand for all taxpayers. In quote, Appeals has made two key revisions to these initial contact letters in response to feedback from taxpayers and practitioners. First, the revised initial contact letter will clear, will clarify that generally taxpayers and representatives can choose how they meet with Appeals through conference that can be held by telephone, video or in person. In addition, Appeals can work with taxpayers and representatives through the mail or secure electronic messaging. Appeals employees can successfully resolve disputes in every type of conference and the type of conference does not impact Appeals decision. Second, in addition to the Appeals Officer's contact information, the initial contact letter will now provide the name and phone number of the Appeals Officer's manager. While the Appeals Officer remains the primary contact for all their assigned cases, the addition of the Manager's contact information will ensure an Appeals stays on track in the rare instance additional help is needed. Going forward, taxpayers and representatives will see the new language providing manager contact information and clarifying conference choice and the initial contact letters sent for most cases received in Appeals, including cases related to an IRS examination, determination, penalties and offer in compromise a request for a collection due process hearing or participation in IRSE file. Quote, we recognize that improving the taxpayer experience is a continuing process. In quote, said Adam Johnson, quote, Appeals welcomes comments and additional ways we can help create a more positive experience for taxpayers and representatives whether through revisions to our communications or through other process improvements. In quote, individuals may submit their comments to there's a place you can there's an email address here and you can send that in by December 2nd, 2022. So there'll be a links to this in the description. You got links to whatever was linked here, not too many links here, but you got this email address if you want to take a look at that and there'll be a link to this in the description.


So hopefully you have been downloading the slides and the tutorial files to follow along in the book And one of the things you might notice is in tutorial one chapter one of Microsoft Word You get a pet file a pet doc x well if we double click on that You'll see that we actually kind of see that and you know right now. It's not that great looking You know no offense. Oh, he's a cute dog cute dog and everything But we run into a few problems say for example, I was to take this and I want to actually use this as an advertisement I want to put this out, you know at the port city Java the Starbucks around town, you know I'm clearly wanting to expand my business as a Photographer so here are the things that I can do well one of them You notice I have a lot of red squiggly lines and blue squiggly lines going on here This is actually known as misspelled words well What's going on is it's indicating this is a misspelled word So I have a few different options one I can simply right-click on that misspelled word and you're gonna see that it gives me a few options for example friend I'm missing the eye so I can now select friend and I'll actually change it on the fly the same kind of thing if I Right-click maybe on this tutorials. You see that I had if I move off in first second I have two commas again, you know, this one's easy. I could hit backspace on my keyboard But what if it's a little bit more complex? This will tell me what I need to do now Tim Bardo Ludi, you know, that's one of those ones And I don't actually want to you know change because that's not Tim's last name Bartlett is not Tim's last name My last name is Guida Guida is Not a name that I want people to You know, I need to be a little careful In fact, what I can do with that is I can actually right-click and you notice how I have this option added dictionary This is actually one of the things I've done on my own version of Microsoft Word because I know how to smell my last name It's always gonna be Guida. It's always gonna be GAW EDA I know it doesn't sound like that, but then again, nobody knows how to pronounce Guida. Anyway, I Can select add the dictionary and it's just one of those ease of my mind I don't have to constantly be told that my name is misspelled in our case We're just gonna select ignore all and you see that that will take care of that Now I do want to go ahead and just change this up a little bit You know, it's not really designed out to be a good advertisement, you know one of the things that we if we pan out a little bit over Here on the view tab, we can actually select something like one page And if you can see well as an advertisement, this doesn't look too great If we kind of go across the hall you might notice that most flyers are actually in what's known as Landscape orientation landscaping meaning sort of If you want to think of it, this is known if we look at our book for a second. This is known as Hamburger style. This is known as hot dog style. Yes, I know I'm using food analogies to describe this but hot dog style So again now we can start to work now. We can start to play a little bit Let me zoom in a little bit more a little less. There we are right about there So one of the things that we can do is let's highlight that first line Now you notice over here. I'm kind of positioning my cursor to the left margin section I could come over here and just highlight all of this But one of the beautiful things and where it is if I kind of move to the margin area where I know nothing is and I click Look at that. I highlighted everything and Now I have the ability to change any one of these options So I can change my font size say instead of it being In 11 I change it to something like 72. Oh 72 is a little too big so I'm gonna shrink it down a few now what I can do is I can actually use these Increase and decrease font size buttons over to the right And if I click on them and notice what happens suddenly went from 72 to 48 Still kind of a little over. So let me shrink it down again. All right. There we go now at 28 I have it all at least on one line All right. Well, I want to go ahead and jazz this up a little bit more maybe Increase the font size of that second little tagline, you know I do need to tell people about the portrait studio Otherwise, they're just gonna you know have a question and look at a pretty dog. So I can increase this as much as I need to I'll win a little too far 28 is too big. I can shrink that down. I'm gonna shrink it down just for my sake So it's you know right underneath it. Now one thing I want to do is everything right now is left aligned Notice how here's where the margin kind of begins and everything's all on that. I Don't like that so much. So I'm gonna actually click hold and drag my mouse downward So I'm highlighting everything Again inside this paragraph section You might notice that we have a little kind of selected box right here This is known as my left a line button a line left button Well, right beside that is actually something known as the a line center button And what this will do is this will actually now look at the margins So that margin and that margin and it will kind of find the middle ground between the two of them Find the middle ground between the two of them as you can guess if that's what middle does If I select the right a line button makes everything right line and justified It's a little weird, but it's gonna try and bring everything as close to the margins as possible We're not gonna see too much of that at least right now But that's something you see a lot in newspapers. So my mistake. I just want to go ahead and select center and We're starting to get somewhere. We're starting to play around a little bit more. All right Well, I want to go ahead and maybe mess around with this dog image, you know It looks cute pretty but it's a little tiny especially since I've got so much white space Over here. Well, one of the things I can do is you notice when I clicked on it I got all of these the square blocks around the edge These are known as my anchors and what these anchors allow me to do is click hold and drag outward and look what happens to our poochie There are you know if I keep being a little careful I can see as soon as I let go now We've got something going on now. I'm gonna just maybe increase for example Pet photography just so we can see that a little bit more, you know a little too much But obviously that's one of those things that we need to kind of look at So we're starting to get this a little jazzed up


Hell yeah, what's up guys this is CursePike. My friends call me Bigsy. Back in action today. We're talking wounded That's right guys. You like scary games? You like old-school indie survival horror games? Well, I got something for you I got three free keys for wounded. This game got great reviews on Steam And it's had a whole bunch of major updates and the game got a whole lot better So let's talk about the game. By the way, it's running behind me so you get an idea as to what's going on here Well, here it is. You play as a guy named Tim, and yeah, you're not gonna believe this, but he is a former Water polo champion. How cool is that? How many games do you know with a water polo champion? Exactly, you should play it just for that, but it gets better. Not only is he a water polo champ Yeah, well anyways, he gets injured. He can't do his water polo no more and well What can I say? He goes into the alcohol. He gets into trouble with his wife and his daughter and well Things go sideways pretty quick. All right, his daughter goes missing in some sort of Sea storm boat accident. I don't know the details on it, but it's pretty vague But yeah, anyways, you end up at this big rock motel and yeah, they someone's got your daughter and Somehow it seems to be related to his wife who's a detective and she's investigating something called the Skinner case Now the Skinner you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the Skinner does Yeah, he skins people this guy is not cool. He belongs in the Game of Thrones and he flays people I don't know man. I don't trust it. If you're walking around without your epithelium. Yeah, you're not gonna last too long But anyways guys this game it's indie horror at its finest. It's got jump scares. It's got a great story It's got great graphics. It's had a whole bunch of updates and I got three free keys. How good is that? I know it's pretty awesome How do you get the keys simple just add me on discord big C number four seven two five my info is in the description below Add me. Let me know that you're looking for a copy of the game first three people you get a copy. How good is that right? Okay, guys. Anyway, thanks for watching. I got a ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned