Technology in music series; (part 8) the internet – friend, foe or just a tool? (III)

Nor is viral marketing on the internet the sole domain of rock and pop bands. Country artist Michael Lee Austin created an internet-based fan club, giving away memberships and music. Armand Morin, from Austin’s record company, Alive, explained:

With the creation of the internet, it is more about relationships now than ever before. A high-tech marketing strategy needs to be supplemented with a high-touch system to stay in constant contact with your customers and fan base and build that relationship.

In marketing, there’s a buzzword for this sort of relationship: branding. It allows the customers to take ownership of an artist as “their band” and develop an emotional attachment. What judicious use of the internet has changed is that now artists don’t necessarily need radio or even vast resources to create this relationship. One of the leading tools costs nothing for the user or the artist: the web-based community, epitomized in the early 2000s by MySpace.com. The site allows artists to post tour dates, bios, information, and most importantly, music. They can communicate back and forth with existing, new, or potential fans. As Hawthorne Heights lead singer JT Woodruff recalled, “When we were trying to get going, all of us would spend at least four hours every day just adding MySpace friends.”

As with any discourse, especially in the record business, even veteran artists with similar points of view disagree. David Bowie feels that “the lack of control which people criticize the internet for is what I’ve found most attractive about it… . The idea of formalising the Net is awful – and it won’t happen.”

Pete Townshend, on the other hand, noted, “What bothers me about the internet is that rapidity of change. That speed of change means that there’s no academy, there’s no process. Nobody can teach anybody anything. In 1985, just before the internet became established, I did a lecture at the Royal College of Arts. It’s the only one I’ve ever done… . At this particular lecture, I said that music would be sold down telephone lines. The audience got up and walked out. The couple that remained, remained only to heckle, to say why would anyone want to do that?”

However, as the 1990s matured, music down phone lines through personal computers became the hot topic around the record business. Especially as most of the music going down those phone lines had only been paid for once and shared dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times. The internet music genie was out of the bottle and devising new ways of creating mischief.

Not that everyone in the record business thought file sharing was necessarily a bad thing. “We should thank the heavens if we come up with a record kids want badly enough that they’re willing to waste their precious, hormonally infused minutes downloading them on their internet,” chided one independent record company president. “Internet music sites don’t threaten the record industry nearly as much as greed and stupidity.”

Some companies tried to develop an online business model, like the Liquid Audio partnership with Larry Rosen and Phil Ramone’s Music Boulevard. They made live tracks from various artists on their N2K label available on the internet only, things like Richard Barone doing the closest thing his old band the Bongos ever had to a hit, “Barbarella,” live. They had the right idea but they were too far ahead of the curve.

In the meantime, the fearless prognosticators began to fearlessly prognosticate, saying that four years  down the road, direct delivery of music would account for between 7 and 13.5 percent of the music business. Lighting up at these suggestions, dozens of legitimate companies tried their hand at the online music business. As it happened, from 1999 through 2000 one music industry expert worked for one of these “legitimate” online music sites, MCY.com. As with Liquid Audio, the key was encryption, along with high sampling rates and compression. The company had its own proprietary software player, and the purchaser could also load the music into an early MP3 player, the Rio. Before we changed our music business model, he says; to proprietary webcasts, and made the online music sales a secondary part of the business, we had sold dozens of downloads. Consumer thinking, by that point, was why buy when you could swap?

As Warner’s chief information officer Tsvi Gal said:

Now there is a generation of people who are not used to paying for intellectual property, not because they are bad people, but because we never insisted on teaching them that it has to be paid for. So the industry is now trying to reconcile its mistakes.