And just one more Bald Eagle... I guess you can tell that I'm pretty excited about TSIG's new alliance :~)
Regards,
Phil
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Internet rocks the music industry Computer CD recorders and
leaps in data compression are making the Internet a viable conduit
for selling -and stealing - music.
DAVID BLOOM
10/17/98
A week before their 30th wedding anniversary, a man decides to give his wife a personalized collection of the songs they listened to when they first met. With a few clicks on a Web site, he compiles a custom CD, picks the song order, titles and decorates the disc and pays for it. By the time of the celebration, they're dancing to the CD.
Elsewhere, a bar band rolls into town. The nightclub's sound man plugs a cable into the mixing board, sending a live feed from the concert onto the Internet, giving anyone with a computer and a connection a prime seat as the band sizzles through three sets.
After the show, band members tell newly converted fans their Web site
address. At the site, the faithful can check tour dates, buy the band's music and T-shirts, listen to live recordings and hook up with other like-minded listeners.
While the talk has been about television and the computer, the Internet and the digital revolution behind it are turning the music world on its ear. Internet "radio" services, for instance, offer genres of music seldom heard on a broadcast station, while other sites feature jam sessions and live concerts, broader visibility for unsigned bands and the chance to rediscover long-out-of-print music by better-known artists.
But for every new winner in a revolution, there's an old loser. Record
company and retail-store executives are worried about losing money to
on-line competitors and to piracy as note-perfect illegal copies can be shipped in a heartbeat around the world.
On the other hand, they reason, there's nothing stopping them from
cashing in -- if they can just figure out how.
"It's not going to happen by itself, but musicians have to realize we're in a digital age," said Wendy Hafner, director of music marketing for Intel Corp., the big computer-chip maker. "One hundred million PCs will be shipped this year all over the world. It's a huge, huge opportunity for the music business to take advantage of."
Need for speed
The explosion in Internet music the past year has been driven by a series of improvements in technology: faster Internet connections, better compression programs and players, higher-quality computer sound cards and speakers. The result is sound quality at least as good as FM radio and approaching that of CDs, with access to a dizzying variety of music.
"One of the things I enjoy about working in this field is how quickly things have progressed," said Nicholas Wild, director of technology at the House of Blues new-media division, which Netcasts three live concerts and up to 10 album "listening" parties every week. "When I started first using the Net, I was downloading text. Now you see video getting integrated into Web sites."
To keep ahead of the changes, the House of Blues -- a chain of clubs
co-founded by actor Dan Aykroyd --is installing full digital production studios at all six of its locations so it can easily create broadcast-quality concert videos anywhere, Wild said. For all its quick adoption of technology, it still may not be able to keep pace with all the changes, company executives say.
On Web sites such as MusicMaker(www.musicmaker.com) and
CustomDisc (www.customdis.com) a visitor can page through more than
100,000 legally licenced tracks by a wide range of artists, pick out
favourites and have the Internet company create a made-to-order CD.
Other sites will sell a legal, digital copy of music that will play on a computer using technologies such as Liquid Audio or A2B that encrypt
the music so it can't be duplicated. And if the customer has a recordable CD drive, he or she can even create custom CDs with the music.
"We have an opportunity to re-create some of the magic of the 1950s,
when you had a hit single and could break a record in a region," said
David Kessel, a musician and chief executive officer of the Internet
Underground Music Archive, whose Web site features music by and
information on unsigned bands.
A boost for radio
"Radio" has blossomed on the Internet, too, including Net-only music
programmers -- such as Spinner.com in Burlingame, Calif., and Toronto's Virtually Canadian (www.virtuallycanadian.com) -- that don't even broadcast over the airwaves.
Spinner, for instance, slices more than 100,000 tracks of music into 104 genres, including many that just can't be found in American broadcast radio.
"You're not going to go to any market in this country and get a Delta
blues format or a Celtic format or an all-Baroque format," said Scott
Epstein, Spinner's vice-president for marketing and content.
"Forget having four or five rock stations in a market," said music
consultant Ted Cohen. "You're going to have hundreds or thousands of
choices."
And even more musical choices will abound when record labels start
putting their massive back catalogues of out-of-print music into digital format and make it available for purchase on line, Cohen said.
Such an approach solves the industry's unwillingness to print CDs of old music only to have them gather dust on warehouse shelves, Cohen said.
Discontent
Music industry leaders acknowledge digital music 's many possibilities
but cite some deep concerns in the next breath.
"We're excited about the technology," said Michael Greene, president of the U.S. National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. "Fifty
thousand albums are released a year. We know there's a lot of great
music out there that consumers can't get to. The next three to four years provides amazing opportunities for individual labels and groups that radio has ignored."
Sites like Kessel's IUMA, Scour.net and the Ultimate Band List already
provide ready access to thousands of bands whose music they otherwise
might never hear.
"It's going to allow people more information about every single piece of music product they can get their hands on," said Tom Roli, publisher of the on-line magazine WebNoize. "It's an opportunity for a rebirth of the music industry," Roli said. "It's the best thing for everybody, demand programming. What you want when you want it."
But Greene and others in the record business fret over piracy -- illegal, high-quality copies of music that can be easily duplicated and distributed through the magic of a wired world.
"From an intellectual-property perspective, all of our traditional concerns are multiplied by a thousand on the cyberfrontier," Greene said.
Pirates ahead
People like Greene are afraid of people like Chris Ward of Valencia,
Calif., a Northwestern University student and big fan of the MP3
computer audio format, which creates a high-quality, highly compressed
file that can be easily stored or transferred over the Internet.
College students in particular use freely available software to encode a standard CD song into the MP3 format on their computers. Hundreds of
sites have copies of illegal MP3s available for downloading, which takes seconds on a college campus's high-speed Internet connection.
Ward paid for none of the 50 MP3 songs on his computer but says he
wouldn't have bothered to buy most of them otherwise. He did find
MP3s of a new favourite band, Guster, that in turn led him to buy a CD
of the band he didn't already have.
"You can decide you like a song, spend maybe 10 minutes on the Web
looking for it and if you can find it, great," Ward said.
David Basskin, executive director of the Canadian Music Publishers
Association, said the piracy problem is getting worse "with every hour."
One possible way to improve the situation, he said, would be to force
Internet service providers -- companies through which consumers
connect to the Internet -- to block access to sites that contain infringing material.
But the piracy issue has been all but ignored by the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, he said.
"Historically, the CRTC has not taken very much interest in copyright
questions." And yet, he said, the CRTC does care about Canadian
culture, so it should care about piracy, because if Canadian copyright
holders don't get paid for their material, there will be little incentive to create new Canadian content. "It'll be all oldies all the time," he said.
Another way to improve the situation, music industry officials say, would be to make Internet providers pay a tariff for material distributed over their networks. This is a solution being sought by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), which administers performing rights. (The federal Copyright Board has yet to rule on the legal aspects of the proposal.)
In the United States, the music industry is using technology to force
violators to pay up. The Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) uses automated software that snoops through the Internet looking for sites offering illegal songs, said Brandy Thomas, whose Virginia company, Cyveillance, does the electronic sleuthing for the RIAA, the Association of Songwriters, Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP, a SOCAN counterpart in the United States) and other large entertainment organizations.
Marketing bonanza
At the same time, many pop-music bands are giving music away on the
Internet. That makes it easier to get noticed, though it doesn't guarantee success.
Even some notable musicians and bands are using the Net to promote
their music or reward loyal fans. Beastie Boys, Hole, Live, Massive
Attack, and Jesus and Mary Chain have given away tracks in recent
months through the Internet.
And Frank Black, a former member of the Pixies, is selling his entire new album, Frank Black and the Catholics, on the Internet through
Goodnoise, a new Palo Alto, Calif.-based label dedicated to selling music in digital form.
"It's giving people instant access to what they want," Cohen said. "We've been at the mercy of whoever's programming our life. The whole thing is to turn people on to music. I don't know of anything else that's come along that could do that."
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