Hi, this is Quincy Carroll — I started iPlayMusic in 2003 with my brother-in-law and good friend from business school.  Over the years, the company has gone through a few changes, and we’ve developed products that we feel represent our best efforts in quality, ease-of-use, and fun.  It all started with 9 video clips that we shot in my garage and posted for sale on eBay.  The videos tought basic skills like how to strum and play a few chords.  I actually found one here on Google video that we posted ages ago…

Old Google Video 

In this video I’m wearing a black T-shirt with a small logo in the left corner that says “Bobby’s Surf Camp,” which is a surf camp off the jungle coast of Java, Indonesia that I visited in the summer of 2002.  If you look closely in the bottom right frame, you can actually see the white sheet we used to lay on the floor of my garage, so you wouldn’t see a dirty garage floor.

I wrote our first book in 2004 (published with Microsoft Word) shot some more videos, and then authored a DVD with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro.  We started selling it on eBay and Amazon, and we continued to see really positive results, since people seemed to love it and were giving us great feedback in our eBay feedback comments as well as in unsolicited emails.  This gave us the fuel we needed to keep going and developing more products.  People told us they loved the book and DVD and that they were learning to play, often parents with children who were learning together.

In 2005, we stepped it up a notch, reshot the videos with a nice clean white background, developed DVDs with advanced menus and learning features (like loop playback), and repackaged all the products with a nice look and feel.  We also produced a Level 2 DVD and started selling guitar bundles, that include the DVD, guitar, and accessories.   Our goal with these bundles, as it is with all of our products, is to offer the highest quality possible at the best prices available.  These guitars are an incredible value, as we have found suppliers that provide high quality instruments at low prices.  To see some of our bundles, you can visit http://www.iplaymusic.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=28.

In 2006 we starting talking to music publishers and licensed the rights to create videos for songs by the Beatles, Bob Marley, and others.  We then developed software in which you can learn to play songs like “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Redemption Song,” and “Yellow Submarine,” and then export these song videos to your iPod and record and remix your own versions of the songs in programs like GarageBand and Sony Acid XMC.  To see the Mac version of our Beginner Guitar Lessons software, you can visit:

http://www.iplaymusic.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=22_35&products_id=56

Since lots of the people using our products seemed to be families with children, we decided it was then a good idea to create a product for kids to learn and play with their families.  We went up to Sonoma and shot videos with a professional puppeteer, who animated our playful character “Capo.”  Capo added so much fun and life to the videos, and we’ve seen an incredibly positive response to this product called Play Music Together, as we won a Parents Choice Approved award in 2007.  To see the Mac version of this product in action, visit…

http://www.iplaymusic.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=22_35&products_id=58

In 2007, the  one thing we continued to hear from our students and customers is that they want more songs.  We spent the year developing a downloadable version of our software, so that as we license the rights to more music and get more videos and songs, we can easily post them up for sale.  This is our most exciting new project, and we are looking forward to really developing this Download Store in 2008.  To download the software for free, visit www.iplaymusic.com/download. 

Having been working on this now for 4 years, I am as excited as ever to see where we go in 2008.  Please keep coming back and let me know what you think…

To see a good interview on this and other topics, please check out my Q&A with John “Nemo” Nemerovski from MyMac.com here…

http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=3202

Thanks for checking us out,

Quincy