Peter Sinclair: Music not soothing the savage beast

By PETER SINCLAIR

Martin Tobias, bikie founder of Seattle's Loudeye Technologies, spoke up at last week's Streaming Media West 2000 conference to slam the failure of the "overhyped" streaming media sector to make much impact, let alone any real money.

"It's time to stop patting ourselves on the back and get serious," he said.

But any changes are probably going to take rather more than just him revving his Harley. Maybe his new media subscription service which helps manage digital content will do the trick.

Music soothes the savage breast everywhere but on the web, it seems. There, disharmony prevails and one step forward is often accompanied by a sudden lurch back. Witness last week's abrupt implosion of the Riffage website.

For 18 months, Riffage had striven to unite fans and musicians, building a following for emerging artists and using the power of the web to spotlight independent new music.

Hailed only months before as "the last, best bastion for musicians on the internet" which had "remained true to its goal of developing and providing good independent music for the masses," suddenly it was all over.

"Pioneers enjoy the thrills of new frontiers but must also deal with the risks inherent in uncharted territories," went a regretful posting from "the Riffage Team."

"Having reached out to a million fans and tens of thousands of bands, we cannot continue to service these fine communities in the current economic marketplace ..."

To mark the spot where it went down, Riffage left only a few floating promises of payment and a link to www.besonic.com — "a great site with lots of state-of-the-art features and a vibrant band and fan community."

But ironically, that link was dead too ...

The question is being asked: will the net kill live music? According to music editor Eliot Van Buskirk, many kids today would rather get their stuff into circulation on Napster than do the traditional hard yards of dreary gigs in dingy clubs. And mastering songs digitally is lots easier than the old-fashioned route to glory — practice.

"In fact," says Buskirk, "it could be said that the experience of live music, which requires you to leave your house and commune with other humans, is conceptually at odds with the internet ..."

But getting swapped on Napster under its new Bertelsmann regime is not as easy as it used to be, anti-Establishment rock band Rage Against the Machine has just discovered.

Its fans complained of being prevented from logging on to the file-sharer and redirected to a web-page accusing them of contravening the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"The move ... against Rage fans was taken completely unilaterally by our new management," according to guitarist Tom Morello on the band's website. "In future we will be more vigilant ..." He also posted instructions for evading the Napster block.

This spat spotlights dramatically the divide between record-labels and those artists who, like Limp Bizkit, have taken Napster's side in the online copyright wars. Sony Music, parent company of Rage Against The Machine's label, Epic, is one of the companies suing Napster.

It's become the latest yardstick to determine which artists are truly bleeding-edge and which, in reality, closet conservatives.

By that measure, Metallica and Madonna are starting to sound somewhat elderly ...

Links:

Loudeye Technologies

Streaming Media West 2000

Riffage

Besonic

Napster

Rage Against The Machine

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Limp Bizkit

Metallica

Madonna


E-mail: petersinclair@email.com