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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, January 30, 2001
TOP STORY:
* FM's Buggle: Can Technology Breathe Life Into Radio?
NET NOISE:
* Radio-locator.com
BEATS:
* It's Gonna Cost Ya
Napster to launch a fee-based service by mid-year; it won't say for
how much.
* Leo, We Hardly Knew Ye
Chiariglione bows out of his thankless SDMI leadership role.
DOT DOT DOT:
* EMI/BMG Inch Closer ... Car of the Digital Music Future ... EMusic's
'Jazz'
ERRATA: As many of you kindly pointed out, Jason Newsted, the exiting
member of Metallica, was the band's bass player, not the drummer. The
drummer is Lars Ulrich. And you're right, we should have known better.
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TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
FM's Buggle: Can Technology Breathe Life Into Radio?
By Julene Snyder
When you talk to people who've bailed out of the traditional radio
business for greener, less-corporate pastures, you notice they tend to
use words like "monopoly" and "sad" when discussing the state of the
industry they once loved. Then they point the collective finger at the
1996 passage of the Telecommunications Act. Once deregulation took
place, the big players were free to own as many as eight stations in a
given market, thus speeding up the homogenization of playlists.
While Internet radio is so early in its infancy that it is more egg
than bouncing baby, there are signs that new sites and technologies
may be able to goose FM radio in different directions. Companies like
MP3.com are producing shows for FM stations, while sites like Liquid
Audio and Spinner Networks, simply by dint of presenting more options,
could force FM to change.
One of the ideas with the potential to affect FM radio most directly
is PickTheHits.com. Privately held, the company was launched last
summer with the aim of helping record labels, managers and artists use
the Internet as a marketing tool. Head honcho Alan Burns, who has been
in radio for 30 years, says the Internet is an ideal place to
test-market new music, especially when compared with old-school
methods like "callouts" (placing phone calls to those in a particular
demographic and asking them to rate song "hooks") and auditorium
testing. "So far our predictive accuracy has floored me," said Burns,
speaking from his North Virginia office. "Our system has been
infallible."
While registered users at PickTheHits.com are relatively modest in
number, Burns hopes that he'll be looking at 6 million to 10 million
monthly visitors a few years from now. Burns says that all of the
major labels have signed up for the company's marketing and
promotional services. "Ideally, research should help people find out
where to find the music they think is good," explains Burns. "But
there's so much music released every year that the competition is
fierce. If a label can take a record to the right place in the first
place, our service is a success."
It doesn't take a marketing report to discern that a lot of people are
disgusted with the current state of FM radio. "No one ever told me
what to play," says Michael Halloran, a former DJ and program director
(most recently at San Diego's 91X) now producing programs for FM radio
at MP3.com. "Now, major corporations decide what gets played."
But even though anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some
subgroups of people don't like constant repetition, lack of diversity
and programming done en masse back at corporate headquarters, a report
released last week by the Radio Advertising Bureau paints a rosy
picture for the industry, with radio ad sales "poised to remain
solid." In fact, RAB President and CEO Gary Fries foresees a year
where "radio will ride the top of the wave." And if things are looking
good enough financially, there's little incentive to rock the boat and
reinvent the way playlists tend to be compiled.
Even if changes are made, the somewhat glacial pace at which large
corporations move, combined with the rapid ascension of technologies
like CD burners and streaming music on-demand, may make FM radio moot,
leaving services like PickTheHits.com behind. As Halloran says, "The
reason the Internet has gotten so huge is that people aren't satisfied
with the status quo." Five years from now, we may not only be playing
in a whole different ballgame but in an entirely new sport.
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NET NOISE
~~~~~~~~~
Radio-locator.com
Putting function ahead of form is very nearly a lost art when it comes
to Web sites, which makes it even more of a treat when you happen
across a site like this one. Stripped down to its essence,
Radio-locator.com strives to serve as a master list of all the radio
stations on the Internet. Methodically bringing order out of chaos,
site mastermind Theodric Young maintains two radio station databases
here. He explains, "The first, which we maintain ourselves, contains
information about radio station call signs, frequencies, cities,
affiliated universities, formats, Web page URLs and whether or not
those stations broadcast their signal on the Internet. The second
database we use is the FCC's radio engineering database, which we
download on a regular basis. We use this database to obtain
information about radio stations' transmitter power, antenna height,
and longitude and latitude." As elegantly as it currently works, Young
is still striving for yet more correlation between the lists and
promises that the two will be merged more effectively in the near
future. Looking around at the orderly site, we believe him. Want to
find stations in the deep South that stream children's music over the
Internet? Got it. Feel like hopping over to San Francisco's KFOG to
listen to "10 at 10"? No problem. Got a yearning to hear what they're
listening to in Reykjavik right now? Won't be a minute. Wondering
whether there's an alternative radio station to take the chill off
next time you're in Boise? You're in luck. All this, and the barely
known tidbit that Cookie Monster's given name was Theodric A. Monster
before he legally changed his name in 1972.
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BEATS
~~~~~
It's Gonna Cost Ya
Napster to launch a fee-based service by midyear; it won't say for how
much.
There are half-hour long infomercials that are more forthcoming about
the cost of a set of Ginsu knives than the execs at Bertelsmann are
about how much, exactly, they'll be charging for the planned midyear
subscription version of Napster. Numbers are being bandied about that
range from five to 15 bucks a month, but all anybody's willing to say
for sure is they're not sure how much it will cost. "We are not
talking figures yet," Bertelsmann eCommerce Group exec Frank Sarfeld
told IDG News. The price has a direct influence on how valuable the
service is, since a higher tag will likely dissuade users and reduce
the number of selections. Sarfeld went on to explain that the new
model of Napster will be better for a couple of reasons: It will pay
artists and copyright holders, files will be scanned for viruses and
downloads will be of reliable quality. Of course, it would be nice if
that pesky lawsuit that four out of five of the major labels are
currently involved in regarding copyright infringement would go away
first. ... Which brings us to the news that TVT Records announced late
last week that it was not only dropping its suit against Napster, but
that the label will offer up master recordings to be used for
file-sharing on the service. That makes TVT - home to acts like Snoop
Dogg, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry - the first label to fully settle
with Napster.
Read more at
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,21756,00.html?nl=bts
and
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,21662,00.html?nl=bts.
Leo, We Hardly Knew Ye
Chiariglione bows out of his thankless SDMI leadership role.
Last week's news that Leonardo Chiariglione was stepping down as
executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative was hardly a
surprise to those of us who've interviewed him over the past year.
Frankly, given the angst and aggravation that the project seemed to
cause him, we're surprised he lasted this long. Still, it's not Leo's
fault that he found himself trying to get the recording industry and
technology companies to come to some kind of a consensus about how
best to protect digital files from copyright infringement. The
Standard's Hane C. Lee reports that the initiative's critics blame
"political infighting and bureaucratic red tape" for repeated delays
of a technical solution to the widespread pirating of digital music.
Leo will stay on board for the next few months. His successor will be
chosen at this week's SDMI meeting in Los Angeles, according to an
organization spokeswoman.
Read more at
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,21655,00.html?nl=bts
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DOT DOT DOT
~~~~~~~~~~~
EMI/BMG Inch Closer ... Car of the Digital Music Future ... EMusic's
'Jazz'
Although last week's New York Post reported that EMI Music Group was
just about to merge with BMG, today's Variety states the pair won't be
consummating the union before the end of the month, as they'd
previously planned. Word is that EMI will sell Virgin Records to Zomba
Group's Clive Calder, who would then be in a position to merge Virgin
and Zomba - which includes the label Jive Records, home of 'N Sync,
the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears - into a company that would
become the fifth major label, which could ease regulatory concerns and
fast-track the EMI/BMG merger. ... Digitrends reports that Internet
distributor Vitaminic has partnered with the Italian car company
Renault to created the "Vitaminic Clio," which is being somewhat
predictably billed as "the car of the future." Fourteen thousand
special-edition cars will be available in Italy and will include an
MP3 player along with the Vitaminic logo. ... If Ken Burns' PBS
documentary "Jazz" left you wanting to hear the entire songs in
question - as opposed to the snippets that kept the series moving
right along - EMusic.com has put up a section
(http://www.emusic.com/features/kburns/) where fans can download
albums and recordings ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious
Monk to Charlie Parker. No, it's not free, but the prices are
ultra-reasonable, and as an added bonus, you can find companion
articles from Downbeat Jazz magazine alongside many selections.
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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