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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, October 24, 2000
TOP STORY:
* Mix Tapes in the Age of Napster: Can Imix's Model Work?
NET NOISE:
* Mustcreate.org
BEATS:
* MP3.com Opens Checkbook Yet Again
But the sun'll come out tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar.
* Dot Dot Dot
Universal launches subscription service ... Intel's p-to-p meeting
provokes rant ... RATM breaks up
SOUND OFF:
* What's the story behind the best mix tape you ever made or received?
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TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
Mix Tapes in the Age of Napster: Can Imix's Model Work?
By Julene Snyder
Making the perfect mix tape has been a rite of passage for decades.
For many of us, having friends with itchy recording fingers has turned
us on to hundreds of songs we wouldn't have otherwise heard. But while
it's one thing to put together some music for your buds for little
more than the cost of a blank tape, it's quite another to fork over
$20 for a customized CD.
Yet that's exactly what Connecticut-based Imix.com is trying to do.
The company, which enables you to customize CDs for about $20 a pop,
recently teamed up with Yahoo Shopping in a move that will give the
privately held company increased visibility.
But even with 250,000 songs available to make your custom CD,
consumers will find major gaps in the songs available for their mixing
pleasure. Indeed, a look at the top artists at Imix.com hardly
reflects the current charts. The band Boston, for example, is No. 2.
Hall & Oates is at No. 7. Jim Croce made the top 20. And at 99 cents
each - with a $5.99 base price, plus shipping and handling - you can
easily find yourself dropping $25 for a compilation that screams
"campy-pop-from-decades-past" to that special someone.
The reason for the somewhat erratic offerings? The major labels'
reluctance to license rights to the songs that are most popular on the
charts. "The industry is set up to sell albums," says CEO David Gould.
"There is fear and anxiety over any attempt to sell songs rather than
albums. The labels are afraid: If they let people buy the songs that
they want, what's going to happen to the industry revenue base?" Imix
has obtained licensing agreements with two of the big five labels -
BMG and Sony - but getting those took years. Gould says that the
company is in negotiation with another label, but it's a long process
at best.
Of course, anyone on Napster can get these songs anyway and, with the
help of a CD burner, can customize away. This limits the market for
Imix - and for competitor Musicmaker.com - to people who refrain from
using Napster because they think it's out-and-out stealing
For his part, Gould thinks that there are plenty of people who want a
more ethical alternative. "I'd love to say that we are a great
alternative to Napster, but we don't have access to the music that
they offer," he says. "For people who are looking for the best in
current, popular music, we don't offer that alternative. No one does.
I can't compete with Napster right now. I don't have what they have.
If I did - and even if I had to charge for it - this company would be
a multihundred million dollar company in a matter of six months."
Surprisingly, however, Gould sees a legal defeat for Napster as a
possible blow to his business. "If Napster loses, it will just slow
things down again," he says. "Napster has validated a couple of
things: Consumers want to buy songs, and they want to have power over
the music they listen to. And consumers like this new-media
distribution model. My fear is that if Napster goes away, it will put
the brakes on all of this, and we're all collectively going to
alienate consumers."
Imix.com hasn't put all of its proverbial eggs in the custom-CD
basket; Gould says that the company is really in the distribution
business, enabling partners to turn on an entertainment store by
providing templates for stores in a box. "Our goal is to be the
company behind the scenes," he says. "Retailers don't have the
resources to create these technologies."
Even if custom CDs are just one slice of the pie, there's good
voyeuristic fun in peeking around to see what kind of tunes people
choose to immortalize on a disc. At Musicmaker.com, a collection
titled "Happy Anniversary: 5 Years & Still In Love" might lead you to
think that you'll just find a bunch of sappy love songs. But au
contraire, mon frere. Instead, we find that this somewhat kinky couple
enjoys tracks like Cannibal Corpse's "Staring Through the Eyes of the
Dead" and Sepultura's "Choke" when they celebrate their relationship.
But for now, if you want to immortalize your feelings by putting "Oops
(I Did it Again)" or "The Real Slim Shady" on a compilation for your
beloved, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: By buying the
whole album, taping it off the radio - or by taking what you want for
free.
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NET NOISE
~~~~~~~~~
Mustcreate.org
When I was in the third grade, our class went to the symphony.
Contrary to what you might think, there was almost no fidgeting by the
gaggle of 8-year-olds during the hour-long performance of "Peter and
the Wolf." For one, the music was really cool. And for another, we'd
been told to pay close attention to the musicians and think about
which instrument we might like to study. I ended up with the violin -
my first choice was the cello, but my parents put the kibosh on that
one, pointing out that it was much taller than I was - and studied
long enough to make it to first violin in the grade-school orchestra.
Of the things I regret in life, stopping my lessons when puberty
started is in the top 10. But, I was still one of the lucky ones; when
I was a kid, music was part of every child's public school curriculum.
It's not necessarily so now, and organizations like Music in Schools
Today, or MUST, have stepped in to fill the breach. They're the ones
behind the (still under construction) Mustcreate.org site, which is
"designed to help students and families, especially the under-served,
to utilize music and arts education to further their welfare." We're
eventually promised celebrity role models and mentoring and job
opportunities for youth, all of which sound promising. In the
meantime, here's an idea: If you're immersed in music either by
profession or passion, why not sign up to mentor a kid, help develop a
program, adopt an instrument or cough up a few bucks? Kids with more
talent and persistence than I had could use a little help.
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BEATS
~~~~~
MP3.com Opens Checkbook Yet Again
But the sun'll come out tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar.
Like many pure-plays, MP3.com's 12-month stock chart could be featured
in a New Yorker cartoon - you know, the kind with a hapless guy
tapping it with a pointer in front of a table of grim-faced executive
types. The caption would be something like, "But if you turn it
sideways, things improve dramatically." (Clearly there's a reason I
don't write New Yorker cartoons.) In any case, last week brought
further news regarding the San Diego-based company. On Wednesday, the
firm settled yet another lawsuit, this one to the tune of $30 million,
to be paid over three years to the National Music Publishers'
Association to cover past and future royalties generated from music
downloads. MP3.com has also agreed to fork over a quarter cent ever
time a song is streamed from the My.MP3.com service. Meanwhile, the
stock sits at four and change, down from its 52-week high of $64.63.
But on Thursday, the company got right back on that pony and announced
that MP3.com had narrower-than expected losses for the third quarter,
with a 9 cent per share loss.
To read more, click here:
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19513,00.html?=bts
Dot Dot Dot
Universal launches subscription service ... Intel's p-to-p meeting
provokes rant ... RATM breaks up
It may not be too late to be part of Universal's testing of its new
subscription service. The first 5,000 to go to
http://www.farmclub.com/mffc/beta and register will be given free,
unlimited access to streams of 20,000 songs from the Universal
catalog. A morning spent with the beta version of the service - which
is expected to ultimately cost about $15 a month to use - was a fun
little way to waste some time, in spite of the clunky navigation and
the far from intuitive playlist function. ... Speaking of fun ways to
wile away the hours, take a minute or three and read Cory Doctorow's
hilarious rant on Mindjack (www.mindjack.com/feature/p2p.html) about
the first meeting of a peer-to-peer working group that was convened by
Intel a few weeks ago. "It was like crashing the first meeting of the
Trilateral Commission as they divvied up the world," muses Doctorow,
who has the sort of delicious wit that makes the young girls swoon.
... If there was any doubt that Rage Against the Machine is huge,
dude, it was erased by the blizzard of stories online about last
week's news that the band had broken up. Here is a far-from-complete
list of those who listed this as their top online story last Thursday:
SonicNet, MTV.com, VH1.com, Jam Showbiz, Live Daily, MusicNewswire
Direct, Rolling Stone, Spin and Wall of Sound.
SOUND OFF
~~~~~~~~~
This week's question: What's the story behind the best mix tape you
ever made or received?
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.
FEEDBACK:
Last week's question: Would you use an easy fix to bypass a CD's
watermark? What if you didn't think you'd get caught?
Why should I? To save some money? How much will the "easy fix" cost
me, eventually? I am not naive enough anymore to believe that the
"easy fixes" will all be free. They will probably end up with prices
related to their perceived performance/reliability/features/coolness.
So the money is not saved, it just goes to somebody else's pocket.
- Lee Allen
Sure, I'd use it. Look, I have 2,000 CDs here at my house, slowly but
surely being put into a massive hard drive so my wife and I can listen
to the music we BOUGHT with OUR MONEY. I work downstairs in my office;
she works upstairs in hers. If they tell me we can't share our music,
I'll find a way to do it anyway. I don't SUBSCRIBE to a song - I buy
it. And from that moment on, forever, it's mine to do with as I please
- share it, swap it, keep it, throw it out. End of story.
- Martin.T. Focazio
President
Focazio.Com Enterprises
Digital watermarking of audio (in particular music) has seemed
problematic from the start due to the importance and success of a
"competing" technology, audio compression. At the risk of
over-simplifying, modern audio compression techniques exploit
psycho-acoustic phenomena (such as masking) to achieve high
compression ratios in large part by removing sounds that are not
audible while preserving only the audible components in the compressed
version. If we require the watermark to be inaudible then it stands to
reason that it will not withstand an attack in the form of
compression-decompression by a state-of-the-art perceptual coder.
Given the ready availability of such coders, such an attack must be
considered straightforward and within the capability of even
unsophisticated hackers/crackers.
- Neil Gerr
STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Julene Snyder (julene@well.com).
Editor: Steven Zeitchik (szeitchik@thestandard.com).
Deputy Editor: Michele Keller (mkeller@thestandard.com).
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