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THE INDUSTRY STANDARD'S
B E A T S H E E T
A Weekly Report on the Convergence of Music and the Net
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| http://www.thestandard.com |
Tuesday, May 9, 2000
TOP STORY:
* Dissecting the Hype Machine
Uberbabe Lisa Voldeng holds forth on the digital entertainment
revolution.
NET NOISE:
* Nocturnal Transmissions from Carpemortem.com
DOWNBEAT:
* Napster and MP3.com get judges' cold shoulders.
* MP3.com licenses BMI tunes.
* The RIAA may move into licensing.
* Savenapster.com goes on the auction block.
SOUND OFF:
* What's your vote for most annoying digital music catch phrase?
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TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
Dissecting the Hype Machine
Uberbabe's Lisa Voldeng holds forth on the real digital entertainment
revolution.
By Julene Snyder
It sometimes seems that you can't turn around without tripping over a
self-proclaimed analyst of some kind or another in the digital arena,
but Lisa Voldeng appears to be the real deal. She's really blunt,
really articulate and really informed. Voldeng's emphasis on cutting
through the hype to uncover the real issues buried within is a
refreshing change from the nigh-relentless barrage of press from new
media companies certain that they alone hold the key to the most
revolutionary innovation since bread was first sliced.
The 31-year-old founder, president and CEO of the Uberbabe Media Inc.
empire heads up what's grandly labeled an "entertainment franchise"
that includes "digital mogul," a monthly subscription-only "BS- and
Buzzword-free Forum of Entertainment and Technology" along with its
free weekly companion "mogulwars." While "digital mogul" has under
1,000 subscribers, Voldeng says they include venture capitalists,
journalists and entertainment execs. Given the somewhat pricey fee of
$495 per year, that's not chump change.
Ruthless irreverence is a given at digitalmogul.com. The site recently
upbraided MP3.com, Napster and the RIAA for "wasting dollars,
headlines and a slew of pundits', lawyers', pontificators' and most
importantly, consumers' time, for their incessant sand-kicking,
wind-pissing and rhetoric-dribbling over the petty points of piracy -
all instead of addressing the real issue of why consumers pirate in
the first place, and then removing that motive, rather than merely the
mechanism. Enough, already!"
Breathe deep. Refreshing, isn't it?
Voldeng has her geek credentials. She wrote a Star Wars Holiday
Special script at the age of 11, founded a hardware sales company
before she was a sophomore in college and last year was voted one of
the Top 25 Women in Technology by Ziff Davis.
Uberbabe Media was launched in San Francisco in 1996. "I looked at the
landscape and saw this massive gap between hype and market actuality,"
says Voldeng. "There really was not anybody that was looking at this
intersection and looking at the impact of technology from an unbiased
perspective. Some of (the media) are well-intentioned and genuinely
excited about some of the things that are evolving, but there's not a
lot of digging beneath the surface, especially when you're talking
about entertainment media."
She sees the digital music industry as a case in point. "It's awash in
all kinds of hype, disinformation and garbage," Voldeng says
emphatically. "We're not journalists; we do analysis. We're taking a
different approach; we look long-range, in-depth at specific segments
of the industry and then look at the different connections between
various segments. And the whole PR machine is much more in need of a
good hard spanking as is the media."
Asked to give thumbnail assessments of recent digital music stories,
Voldeng is happy to oblige. "The power of Napster - and maybe
Napster's great reason for being - is to illuminate to us how powerful
distributed computing is." Metallica has "come out with guns blazing
against their fans, and that's just sheer stupidity." And taking a
wider view, Voldeng sees a fundamental shift in the way entertainment
is accessed. "Companies that can deliver (access) in a way that's easy
and seamless and efficient and that is not condescending and is not
based on trying to over-market ... will survive."
Thus speaks the Uberbabe.
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NET NOISE
~~~~~~~~~
Carpemortem.com
From its humble origins as a links page to its current incarnation as
a behemoth resource for goths, www.carpemortem.com is clearly a labor
of love. Originating from the unlikely environs of Detroit, Carpe
Mortem is concerned with industrial, gothic and ambient music and
serves the needs of those genres' legions of nocturnally obsessed
fans. Sadly, some sections aren't updated regularly - a recent visit
found moldy news about events long since dead, buried and putrefied -
but if you long to read the glum history of Joy Division, if you must
find out what Faeries, Bones and Vaseline have been up to, if you
can't live without the latest Throbbing Gristle trivia, you've come to
the right place. As for me, it was worth the visit just to learn that
there's a publication in the world called Corpse in the Cupboard.
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DOWNBEAT
~~~~~~~~
Legal Eagles: You Can't Hide Your Lyin' Eyes
Napster no "safe harbor"; Judge releases MP3.com "opinion statement"
Federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel on Friday soundly rejected Napster's
request for a summary judgment to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the
RIAA. In so doing, she denied the controversial software file-sharing
company's motion to be defined as a "safe harbor" as defined by the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This clears the way for the case to
go to full trial. Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff released
an "opinion statement" elaborating on his ruling in favor of the RIAA
against MP3.com last month. It's a surprisingly entertaining read,
with straightforward lines like, "Stripped to its essence, defendant's
'consumer protection' argument amounts to nothing more than a bald
claim that defendant should be able to misappropriate plaintiffs'
property simply because there is a consumer demand for it." MP3.com
president Robin Richards issued a statement saying the judge's
elaboration was "exactly what we expected" and that the company will
"continue to negotiate with the RIAA and the major labels with the
goal of an equitable business resolution."
MP3.com Makes Its Own Luck
Site enjoys stock boost on news of legal deal to play BMI's songs.
Also in the past week, MP3.com announced a licensing agreement with
BMI for legal rights to play 4.5 million songs on its Web site. BMI
will collect music royalty payments for the more than 140,000 U.S.
songwriters, composers and publishers it represents, when their works
are accessed on the site. San Diego-based MP3.com's shares jumped
nearly 35 percent in the wake of the news Monday and closed today at
nearly $13 a share.
New Line for RIAA?
Is the recording industry planning to get money where its mouth is?
In what sounds like a potential administrative nightmare offset by a
big chunk of change, Webnoize reports that the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) is "making a major move to enter the
music licensing business, potentially collecting and distributing more
money than performing rights groups Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) and the
American Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (ASCAP)
combined." Royalties would be collected for non-analog transmissions
(read: Webcasting) and would require a staff of at least "five or 10
people" to run licensing operations, according to RIAA senior VP of
business affairs Steven Marks.
Dot Dot Dot
Hits up at Farmclub.com ... Riffage.com teams up with Spin ...
Savenapster for sale
This just in from the Department of Irony: Monday's Farmclub.com press
release cited "the legal brawl over music copyright laws" as the
reason that the site's traffic was up 52 percent during the last week
of April. Farmclub, of course, is an off-shoot of the Universal Music
Group, one of the big labels that's busy suing everybody in sight for
copyright infringement ... Starting with the June 2000 issue, Spin
magazine will include a "specially bundled Riffage.com-produced MP3
music CD-ROM." The current disc has a whopping 150 songs from
Riffage's roster of "edgy, aspiring artists" ... Hurry on over to
Ebay.com, where you can bid on the domain name "savenapster.com,"
which is apparently being offered for sale by Indiana University's
Chad Paulson, former Napster supporter and founder of the Students
Against University Censorship. At press time, the bid was a modest
$105.
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SOUND OFF
~~~~~~~~~
This week's question: What's your vote for most annoying digital music
catch phrase or jargon?
E-mail your opinions to julene@well.com with "sound off" in the
subject line, and we'll print a selection of the responses in next
week's newsletter. Letters may be edited for clarity and length, so
keep them short and include your name and affiliation, if any.
Last week's question: Did MP3.com get their just desserts?
"If the RIAA, and to a lesser extent ASCAP and BMI, were really
serious about copyright infringement, they would close down used CD
stores, and the book stores that sell used sheet music, etc.
Obviously, they can't get them all in one place like MP3.com or
Napster. So these organizations (and bands) are essentially picking on
a format. They have forgotten that somebody had to buy the CD in order
to rip it. If you go to Napster and search for a particular song, like
'Enter Sandman,' literally hundreds of choices come up. Go and check
out the site sellyoursongs.com, which protects the songwriter and puts
them in control. After all this dust settles, this kind of site will
really worry the establishment because they have found a business
model that is revolutionary, but still adheres to the 'rules.'"
- Tommy Hiett
"MP3.com created a valuable service when it launched MyMP3.com;
functionally, it is a musical equivalent of Hotmail: One can listen to
their music from any browser in the world. Certainly, there are issues
with the service: I can register my collection of 700 CDs and then
give you my UserID and password, allowing you to listen to my music
from any browser in the world. But I could just as easily loan you my
CD collection, allowing you to pick-and-choose which CDs to burn at
your leisure. Likewise, when I purchased those CDs, I did so with the
intent to (i) loan them to friends, and (ii) invite friends over to
listen to them. Does MyMP3.com push this boundary? Yes, of course, but
only because the technological landscape has softened the boundary
allowing for, and calling for, it to be pushed."
- Bob Hendrickson
STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Julene Snyder. Send newstips and press releases to
julene@well.com.
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