Technically sound

Walter Burt

Age: 54

Family: Married to Debbie Cardinal.

Personal: Born in Utah and raised north of
Missoula, Mont.

Education: Bachelor of arts in music at University of Chicago; master's in music history from UW-Madison.

Professional experience: Worked for National Music Service Corp., Spokane, Wash.; A-R Editions, Madison; Sight & Sound, Milwaukee; Sound Creation, Madison.

About the company: Founded in 1998 by Burt, Tom Hall, Kathleen Marsh and Gary Aamodt. Musicnotes has an online catalog of nearly 60,000 digital sheet music titles.

Employees: About 30

Sales in 2006: About $5.6 million

Web site: www.musicnotes.com

Q. How did your role with Musicnotes begin?

A. There is a company here in Madison called A-R Editions. What it does is publish new editions of old, old music. It's a good business...by far the world leader. The guy who owns it is Gary Aamodt. They engraved their music by sending it out to really expensive German engravers. And there was a guy at Princeton named Tom Hall. Tom had tried to start a company that would do music engraving by computer. The company failed. Gary knew Tom and said "come and do the same thing for us here at A-R Editions." So, Tom came to Madison and Gary came to me and said "you keep talking about how you're interested in computers. Listen, we think there is a future in computerized music engraving and if you were to study computers with an eye on that, there would be a career in that."

Q. Did you have a lot of experience with computers before that?

A. I had started a minor in computer science and statistics. And a bunch of other (music) graduate students got interested in it once they saw I could do it. There is a big intersection between mathematically oriented computer people and music people. ... So (A-R Editions) said why don't you start working with this Tom Hall guy and for years Tom and I have worked on and off on various projects. Musicnotes is a spinoff of A-R Editions and the software that we use at Musicnotes is essentially the same software, through many permutations, that they had in those (early) days.

Q. When Musicnotes began more than a decade ago, e-commerce was still fairly new. What made you think it was a viable business?

A. I have to confess something. I really didn't think it would work. I didn't think that many people would want to buy digital sheet music online. Well, we're pushing 3 million sold. ... I freely and happily admit I was wrong.

Q. When did you realize you were wrong?

A. During a stockholder's war, there was a point where there was no money coming in from investors. You could see the bank balance. We had a burn rate - which is how fast you're eating money - and you can calculate and say "here's the date when you run out." We got to that date (in 2000) and there was still money in the bank. People were asking, "Where did this come from? How come we can still operate?" It was a mystery for about an hour until we figured out that was all profit. That we'd already sold enough. Since then, you can watch our sales and they grow with a curve. It's exponential and it's not as fast as I would have wanted but exponential is good.

Q. What has been the driver behind your sales?

A. Well, there have been a lot of things. I'm not in marketing so I might be wrong. First of all, there are more and more people who are just comfortable with buying stuff online. There's a lot of musicians who had trouble getting at sheet music because they didn't have access to a physical music store or if they did the music store might not stock the music they wanted. As we begin to grow, more and more material that we have available, it seems to bring in more customers. So it's sort of a build it and they will come. You can put up something you don't think people will be very interested in but around the world there are going to be one or two people. And then they come for that and stay for the other stuff, so it kind of snowballs.

Q. Since you're not a marketing and finance guy, was it hard to let other people market your ideas and product?

A. Not at all. We've got a staff of technical people who are very competent and it's hard for me to delegate to them, although they do a better job than I do in most cases. But for the marketing things, talking to investors, talking to publishers, going to New York and dealing with the really big music publishers, I don't have the mindset for that. I would never want to do something like that. This is the first time that I've ever talked to a reporter. Usually, I'm the guy in the back room.

Q. Is it difficult to balance the technical direction of the company with the marketing direction?

A. This is true of any company. There is this constant war between marketing and engineering. The engineering people are saying, "You want what? You want it now? That's ridiculous." And the marketing people are saying, "You're giving me this? You want me to sell that? That's ridiculous." It's like dogs and cats. What we do here is we have some of the technical staff and some of the marketing staff meet every Friday afternoon to just forecast what we're going to do for the next week and sum up what we've done over the past week. And a six-pack of beer comes into play. And you know it's done a lot to smooth over these differences. But it's still true that they sometimes have a different vision for where we're going.

Q. How did Musicnotes survive the dot-com bust?

A. It was touch and go for a while. But we have what we think is a quality product. We didn't spend money the way the other dot-com people did. We had a business model from the beginning that said, "Here's how we're going to make money. We're going to sell stuff and people are going to buy it." Whereas everyone else was just saying, "Well, the money will somehow roll in and we're not really sure how."

Q. How does Musicnotes compare to other online music companies?

A. If you compare us to other kinds of online music companies, most of the ones you hear about in the news are the ones that sell audio. There's this ongoing debate about piracy audio downloads versus legitimate sites and how people are going to pay. You ask how does that affect (Musicnotes)? And the answer is not so much.

(Our success is) because of our customers. These are people who have read music all of their lives. When you download stuff to your iPod, you can get gigabytes of stuff and it doesn't take much time, you just type and it comes. And to consume it you clamp it on your head and go about your business. So it's not investing much of your time and effort. For a musician playing off sheet music, they are investing of themselves. They are having a relationship with the product. That means they are careful about what they get and they appreciate the value of it. We found a business that has good customers.

Q. What does Musicnotes need to do to stay competitive?

A. We're having new versions roll out in the next couple weeks that have new features. This feature that syncs digital audio files with (the sheet music) is an example of it. You've probably heard of our Guitar Guru program. We've got a bunch of other things we're trying on for size but I'm not sure I should be talking about them.