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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, August 22, 2000
TOP STORY:
* Stars From a Different Solar System: Rock Celebs on the Net
NET NOISE:
* DiscJockey.com
BEATS:
* Napster Files Brief That's Anything But Lengthy rebuttal available
for your reading pleasure
* The Whole Unedited Unexpurgated Unending Story Atlantic Monthly
weighs in - endlessly - on digital music
* Dot Dot Dot
MP3.com settles with Sony ... Revolution teams with WiredPlanet ...
MP3Board.com files suit
SOUND OFF:
* If your favorite artist had a subscription service, would you join?
How much would you pay for the inside track on their projects?
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TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
Stars From a Different Solar System
By Julene Snyder
You'd think that rock stars and the Internet would be a perfect fit.
On one side, you have celebrities with something to promote, sell or
give away. On the other, you have fans eager for an inside glimpse of
their favorite artist.
But "official" sites - which tend to be created by the stars' major
record labels - tend to be predictable at best and money-grubbing at
worst. So a few artists are coming up with something better.
One of the more ambitious efforts is Todd Rundgren's subscription
service, PatroNet, which re-launched this week. PatroNet CEO Danny
Goldberg has touted the site as a "business model that allows for an
intimate relationship between artist and fan." That may well be, but
the buggy "Interocitor" media player technology seems designed to send
all but the most persistent visitors scrambling for the exit icon
before they have an opportunity to fork over $5 a month or $40 a year.
Rundgren promises those intrepid enough to hang in and sign up an
intimate view of the creative process, enabling you to "vicariously
accompanying the artist throughout and ultimately acquiring the end
result." Of course, you'll also be offered the "opportunity to
exclusively purchase hard goods, including albums and exclusive tour
merchandise, prior to traditional retail release dates and at
discounted rates."
Over at Courtney Love's Holemusic.com, you're welcome to buy stuff,
but visitors can just as easily download dozens of songs for free. Now
20 years old, Brooke Barnett, the site's Webmistress, first met
Courtney online when she was only 14. "I had been talking to her for a
few years about doing a Web site for Hole, but her record company just
wasn't into it," Barnett explains via e-mail. "Around November, I
heard a poor-quality radio recording of a new song floating around and
told her we could promote it on the Internet, so she said, 'Show me
what you can do.' I put the song up and built a small site around it
and was attracting thousands of visitors within a few days."
Love is known for responding to e-mail herself and jumping into
conversations, which keeps the chat rooms at Holemusic.com packed with
hopeful followers. Barnett says that Love is "very involved" with the
site, but insists that "people go to the site or the chat (rooms) in
hopes of (talking with) Courtney and Hole (band members), but they
stay on the site because of the culture and the community." It's sure
not your usual snoozefest: You'll find articles that date back as far
as 1991 with quotes from Courtney like "Nirvana also is a 'foxcore'
band," as well as photos of Ms. Love and her bandmates ranging from
gauzy fashion shoots to woozy Polaroids.
Perhaps best of all is the Ask Courtney section, where occasional dirt
is spilled: "(W)e've resigned from Universal music," she says when
asked when her new album will be out. "Now of course they still
haven't accepted that we've resigned because they think we want money,
and they can just pay it off. But they are wrong ... What I'd like to
do is get an idea who wants the album - and who wants to hear it and
be able to sell it directly in the American market for a lot cheaper
than you're used to buying music for. If I can succeed at this, it
revolutionizes the music industry. It also puts power into the hands
of artists where it belongs."
More low-key in approach is former Talking Head member Jerry Harrison,
who downplays his celebrity to the nth degree when it comes to his
involvement as co-founder and partner at Garageband.com. (Harrison
looks back at one recent Net play with another company - a chat he did
with Liquid Audio - as a fairly unmitigated disaster. "It quickly
degenerated into a conversation about whether the Talking Heads would
be getting back together," he recalls ruefully from his Bay Area home.
"There was no steering it back on track.")
The idea for Garageband.com came when company co-founder Tom Zito saw
a huge stack of tapes that Harrison had brought back from the South by
Southwest music conference and asked him if there was anything good in
the pile. Harrison confessed that he would probably never find the
time to listen to them and thus wouldn't know. And a company was born,
laughs Zito. "We envisioned this as a way to solve a problem that
Jerry had," he recalls. "The interesting thing is that every producer
we talked to has the same problem."
Other big names on the Garageband.com advisory board include Sir
George Martin, Brian Eno, Steve Lillywhite and Steve Earle, but the
focus here is on unknowns. The end result - if you're a band that's
good and/or lucky enough to rise to the top - is that you can end up
with Jerry Harrison or George Martin producing your debut album.
Julie Gordon, founder and moderator of The Velvet Rope, a community
network for people in the music industry, thinks that big stars find
the Internet a safe place for them to communicate with their devotees.
"Courtney's created a communications network for her fans," says
Gordon. "While it may not be making money now, this is a way to cash
in on your fans and learn important information about them."
Although Gordon is intrigued by Todd Rundgren's PatroNet, she doesn't
see it as a way for the longtime musician/producer to win over a new
generation of devotees. "Sure, this is going to appeal to the longtime
fan," she says emphatically. "But in the end, it's a niche site. How
do you expand your base from those people?"
One niche site that's up and running is David Bowie's online project,
BowieNet (www.davidbowie.com). "He has an entire Web vision," Gordon
says excitedly. "What Bowie has done is transformed his fan club into
an online community." It's definitely a one-stop shop; fans are
invited to use BowieNet as their ISP ($14.95 per month), get unlimited
access to "the world of BowieNet" ($5.95 per month) and join the
BowieBanc and get a debit card complete with the icon's visage
imprinted on plastic.
Sound mercenary? Sure. But fans of the Thin White Duke - like
followers of Prince, John Mellencamp and Courtney Love, to name a few
- are proving that if you build it (and you give them at least the
illusion of being an insider), they will come.
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NET NOISE
~~~~~~~~~
DiscJockey.com
What are you to think when you click on an icon called Jukebox from
Hell and find it playing a song you love? In my case, the horror
quickly passed when I realized a few bars in to it that the song in
question was Natalie Merchant's rendition of "Because the Night" and
not Patti Smith's version. Basically, what you have at DiscJockey.com
is a variety of streaming-audio selections. The intrepid can see if
their musical taste is truly evil (Tom Petty's "Free Falling" seems
unfairly dissed, but following it up with Starship's "We Built This
City" puts us right into the middle of Hades' kingdom). Well, serves
me right for going straight to Hell, which has more than 150 channels
to choose from, ranging from "Hawaiian Luau" to "Polkahaus" to
"Lullababy." Beyond the cutesy-poo names, the big difference between
this and say every other streaming-audio site in the world is the
dubious option of sending personal voice greetings and song
dedications out over the ether to your loved ones. While the place is
stuffed with enough ads to choke a goat - thankfully, most are visual,
but there are annoying little audio plugs interspersed among the music
- DiscJockey.com replicates a somewhat wacky turn across the radio
dial as refracted through an online prism.
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BEATS
~~~~~
Napster Files Brief That's Anything But
In your spare time, you may want to peruse the 79-page legal document
that Napster filed late Friday. The brief does everything but say
"neener neener" to U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in its
attempt to prove that Napster's peer-to-peer file sharing service is
in fact legal. A quick skim of the document leads you to a few
conclusions: a) Be careful what you say to reporters, because the next
thing you know, your quotes will turn up in the legal documents of
your adversaries in ways you may not have anticipated. b) There are a
lot of acronyms in this brave new digital-music world, and an
annotated scorecard with a detailed glossary of terms is essential. c)
Parenthetical phrases shouldn't be allowed to exist inside other
parenthetical phrases. This way lies madness. d) That Jack Valenti has
(had?) a way with words, saying that the VCR was to the movie industry
"as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone." (The brief helpfully
points out that video didn't, in fact, kill the movie industry.) e)
David Foster Wallace was right after all; it's entirely possible to
have a footnote longer than the text it seeks to illuminate. Gluttons
for legal documents can draw their own conclusions by visiting
http://dl.napster.com/brief0818.pdf
Read more at
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,17847,00.html?nl=bts
The Whole Unedited Unexpurgated Unending Story: Atlantic Monthly
weighs in - endlessly - on digital music
If you're an old-school type who likes holding magazines in your
actual hands, run on down to the newsstand and pick up the September
issue of the Atlantic Monthly. But don't plan to stand there and read
the cover story in the store, because you'll be hanging out for a
mighty long time: it clocks in at over 16,000 words. "The Heavenly
Jukebox" is a painstaking look by author Charles C. Mann at the
digital-music conundrum, ranging from sheet music to the intricacies
of copyright law to Metallica and beyond. A few pithy quotes from the
piece - which manages to keep interest from flagging in spite of the
massive length - seem in order: Chuck Cleaver of indie band the Ass
Ponys discusses his experience with labels: "It's relatively mild, the
screwing by Napster compared with the regular screwing." Rock scholar
Simon Frith, editor of 1993's "Music and Copyright" says that for most
bands, "copyright is really just a way of earning less than they would
if they received a fee from the record company." Mann explains that
"losing copyright would thus have surprisingly little direct financial
impact on musicians. Instead, Frith says, the big loser would be the
music industry, because today it 'is entirely structured around
contracts that control intellectual-property rights - control them
rather ruthlessly, in fact.'" Those of you who prefer to do your
reading online (and have time on your hands) can find the whole
unedited unexpurgated story at
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/09/mann.htm
Dot Dot Dot
MP3.com settles with Sony ... Revolution teams with WiredPlanet ...
MP3Board.com files suit
Sony Music Entertainment announced Monday that it has settled a
copyright infringement suit with San Diego-based MP3.com regarding its
MyMP3.com service. While the specific terms were not disclosed, the
company said that the Sony settlement was similar to previous deals
which were in the $20 million range. ... New music magazine
Revolution, which hits the stands in September, has teamed up with
WiredPlanet to stream audio over the Net as part of the Revolution
Network. The idea is that the tunes will "serve as a sort of musical
backdrop for the content in the corresponding issue of the magazine."
... Another day, another lawsuit: The Los Angeles Times reported
yesterday that the search engine MP3Board.com has filed a suit
"accusing America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. of contributing to
online music piracy by unleashing the song-swapping software known as
Gnutella." AOL, of course, distanced itself from Gnutella almost
immediately, pulling it offline and calling it an "unauthorized
freelance project" mere hours after its debut. But with the Net being
itself, the code had already replicated like so many randy bunnies,
and the file-sharing tool Gnutella continues to thrive.
SOUND OFF
~~~~~~~~~
This week's question: If your favorite artist had a subscription
service, would you join? How much would you pay for the inside track
on their projects?
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.
STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Julene Snyder. Send news tips and press releases to
julene@well.com.
Edited by Steven Zeitchik (szeitchik@thestandard.com).
Copyedited by Elese Veeh (eveeh@thestandard.com).
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