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THE INDUSTRY STANDARD'S
B E A T S H E E T
The Latest Digital Music News - and It's Free
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For more on digital music, visit
The Standard's Media & Marketing page:
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
TOP STORY:
* One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
NET NOISE:
* AlternativeTentacles.com
BEATS:
* Lawyers, Napster, What Else is New?
DOT DOT DOT:
* FCC Gets Medieval on a Radio Station's Derriere ... RIAA's Spiffy
Annual Report ... MP3.com's New Service and Big Secret
SOUND OFF:
* This week's question: What's the most significant digital music
development during the past six months?
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TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
After riding the digital music roller coaster for the last six
months,
we're left a bit queasy.
By Julene Snyder
Keeping track of the digital-music industry's lawsuits, countersuits,
mergers and implosions is a bewildering task. While smaller players
have been treading water and waiting for the shakeout to pass them
by, bigger fish are poised to strike, picking off the tastiest morsels
one
by one, either by buying them outright or keeping them off-balance
with one lawsuit after another.
On Monday, we saw two developments that illustrate the direction the
industry is taking: Sony and Universal announced that the music
subscription service formerly known as "Duet" will now be known as
"Pressplay" and will be headed by Andy Schuon, formerly of
Farmclub.com. Meanwhile, online music provider Listen.com agreed
to drop its lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of
America.
And that was just in one day. Let's pause and take a breath here at
the
halfway point of 2001 and glance back at the past six months.
Read the full story:
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NET NOISE
~~~~~~~~~
AlternativeTentacles.com
I had no idea what I was getting myself into years ago when I
interviewed uber-punk rocker Jello Biafra. More than a decade has
passed since then, but I vividly recall my dismay as I sat down to
transcribe the tapes of the interview, on which Biafra had talked
nonstop for more than six hours. Twenty-nine single-spaced pages and
a raging headache later, I still faced the nightmarish task of editing
the
reams of verbosity into a coherent whole. The memory still makes me
shudder, but, hey, the story ended up on the cover of SF Weekly,
complete with a life-sized close-up of Biafra's face. When I saw
Jello
at a club later that week, I expected him to be thrilled that his mug
was
staring out of news-racks all over town. Au contraire, mon frere. "I
thought it would be longer," he groused, unappeased by my
explanation that the paper didn't typically run 35,000-word
stream-of-consciousness screeds. While the former Dead Kennedy
doesn't appear to have mellowed with age, his independent label,
Alternative Tentacles, is still going strong, keeping the punk spirit
alive
with music by bands like Nomeansno, Half Japanese and Beatnigs.
(And, of course, Jello's spoken-word albums, which one imagines must
practically record themselves.) A good portion of the site is devoted
to
the tale of Biafra's legal battle with his former Dead Kennedys band
mates over the group's royalties and catalogue; those who support
Jello's side of the saga are urged to chip in a few bucks to the
Alternative Tentacles Legal Defense Fund. With uncharacteristic
brevity, potential donors are advised that "None of this money will
be
used to run Alternative Tentacles or pay Jello's personal bills, only
to
help cover spiraling legal expenses."
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BEATS
~~~~~
Lawyers, Napster, What Else is New?
Oh, for the love of all that's holy, must we continue to report on
Napster? Yes, we must - but not solely to torture you. (Mainly, we
must because it's our job, and we'd like to keep it.) We also must
because Napster is in the headlines every other minute, and we'd be
remiss if we didn't breathlessly keep you updated on the latest
nuance,
permutation, throat-clearing or other breaking news event. Why, just
this week, the Little File-Swapping Service That Could has hired a
new lawyer. But not just any lawyer, no. This Jonathan Schwartz guy
is a big shot indeed, having served as former deputy to former U.S.
Attorney General Janet Reno and, as The Standard's own Michael
Learmonth put it, he "cut his teeth battling independent counsel
Kenneth Starr." (Ouch. That's got to hurt.) Speaking of lawyers, a
whole gaggle of them from the RIAA and Napster met last week in a
San Francisco courtroom. The actual conversation was strictly
hush-hush stuff, mostly about how everybody is complying with Judge
Marilyn Hall Patel's March injunction. While it's possible they
discussed the MusicNet/Napster deal, no one involved would confirm
squat, although we are left with reports that mucky-mucks from both
camps left the meeting quickly, "exchanging neither words nor glances
with each other."
Read more about Schwartz:
Get the poop on the meeting:
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DOT DOT DOT
~~~~~~~~~~~
FCC Gets Medieval on a Radio Station's Derriere ... RIAA's Spiffy
Annual Report ... MP3.com's New Service and Big Secret
Hey, nice prescience on our part running that music censorship story
last week, eh? Last Tuesday, the Federal Communications
Commission levied a $7,000 indecency fine on Colorado radio station
KKMG-FM for playing the clean version of Eminem's "The Real Slim
Shady," saying that even though expletives had been deleted,
"portions of the lyrics contain sexual references in conjunction with
sexual expletives that appear intended to pander and shock." Uh-oh.
Can a moratorium on "Oops, I Did It Again" be far behind? We can
only hope ... Monday's mail brought the Recording Industry
Association of America's 2000 annual report to our mailbox, and it's
a
mighty swank piece of work. The theme is "Music Matters," and it
opens with a series of photos with white silhouettes substituting for
music icons. See, on the cover, there's a white silhouette of Elvis,
while inside you'll find the outlines of the Beatles crossing Abbey
Road, and a void where Aretha's microphone should be. Get it? (Cue
sledgehammer poised to drive point home.) See, it's an empty world
without music. In RIAA President and CEO Hilary Rosen's opening
essay, she hammers away, saying, in part: "Music matters. That's why
the Recording Industry Association of America devoted the 2000
fiscal year to making music matter to more people than ever before."
Included is a CD-ROM, titled "This CD Has Millions of Songs," that
provides a list of sites offering legally sanctioned music online.
Curiously, among them are Launch and MusicMatch, which the RIAA
recently sued ... Never shy about issuing press releases, MP3.com
made two announcements of note Monday. The first trumpeted the
company's new "Premium Listener Service," billed as "an intuitive
suite of tools that for the first time gives consumers worldwide
access
to their digital music collection" for $2.99 a month or $29.99 a
year.
More mysteriously, the company promises that CEO Michael
Robertson will make a "major announcement" Wednesday via
Webcast that can be accessed through a "very obvious link on
MP3.com's homepage." It's all hush-hush, but we're promised "an
exclusive performance and message from a very special guest." You'd
best be a late owl if you want to be first to see if the hype is
justified,
since it goes up at 3 a.m. EDT.
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SOUND OFF
~~~~~~~~~
This week's question: What's the most significant digital music
development during the past six months?
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: Can a radio station change the world?
I work overseas, where people believe a radio broadcast can change
the world. Radio stations here are fortresses, guarded 24 hours a day
because political entities that want to overthrow governments always
establish their first bastions at local radio and television stations. If
a
government overthrow is under way, the best way to announce it and
get the masses behind the new government is to take over radio and
television stations and broadcast the new parties' objectives.
This is evident in the multitude of international broadcasting
stations'
supported by foreign governments. These include such facilities as
Radio Free Europe, the anti-Cuban government stations broadcasting
now in Miami, etc. If individuals and governments believe their
opponents can be toppled using effective and powerful broadcasts,
why not believe in a station like Killradio? A radio station that is
trying
to "save the world" must be admired for its motives; hopefully this
will
be the first ripple in that proverbial pond, and other better
financed
and established broadcasters will follow this example.
- Dave Kaiser
Crystal River, Florida
I strongly believe that interactive radio (which may or may not be
distributed via the Net) definitely will change the way people listen
to
radio as we currently know it. Initiatives by innovators such as
Clickradio.com, Supertracks.com and Launchcast are paving the way
forward, although they may suffer a similar fate as Netscape, TiVo or
ReplayTV. Record labels cannot ignore the fact that radio has been
their best advertising medium ever and will continue to be so for the
coming decades. MusicNet and Pressplay (Duet) will not cut it,
because they lack the additional entertainment items that separates
radio from a jukebox.
STAFF
~~~~~
Written by Julene Snyder (julene@well.com).
Edited by Michele Keller (mkeller@thestandard.com).
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