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The new technology is waiting for its first break-out artist
Sunday, March 12, 2000 By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
We know why those who like to spend their time in cyberspace are drawn to MP3 technology.
It's free.
There's a sense of discovering talent beyond the distressingly limited range of music the industry wants you to hear. It's subversive. It's trendy. But mostly, it's free.
What's in it for the artist, though? What is it about the lure of MP3 that's driven more than 40,000 acts to make their music available online at MP3.com?
Exposure.
A way to circumvent the system.
A way to build an international fan base from your living room.
Ritual Space Travel Agency, a Pittsburgh band whose music, as great as it is, may be a little out there for the radio, recently climbed as high as No. 35 -- above Alanis Morissette, no less! -- on the weekly alternative music chart at MP3.com with a song called "Agatha Says" that sounds like either XTC on jazz or jazz on XTC.
"The site has been incredibly cool for us," says Jesse Prentiss. "Our CD is on a small independent label [Bandaloop] which only has a few releases out, so it isn't as easy to get our music out to the rest of the world without major label backing and distribution. With MP3.com, we're able to distribute the music internationally for free."
It's also opened up a whole new world of networking options. As Prentiss says, "We hear music from bands around the world, trade reviews, get feedback, etc., in ways that would have been impossible before this technology became available."
Evan Neel has been posting on MP3.com since high school. Gravity's Revenge, his band, has never played outside the city, but the South Park punk-pop group has gotten e-mails from radio stations all over the country requesting copies of the band's CD.
Not bad for school kids.
"We're all pretty much just out of high school," Neel says. "But we get a lot of downloads. It gives people a chance to hear you that otherwise wouldn't. We get e-mails from Boston, and there's no chance we've ever made it that far."
With Neel off at school, as a freshman at Syracuse University, the band is on a break for now, but Neel's been posting solo cuts.
How do you stumble across a guy like Neel in cyberspace when you've probably never heard of him or Gravity's Revenge? Say you're at MP3.com looking for a cut from Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience. You type in Dr. Frank and Neel turns up as a similar artist.
So it works -- at least as far as presenting his music as an option to those who may be predisposed to like the sort of thing he's doing.
One thing the Web site hasn't done -- at least for Neel -- is generate a lot of money. While it's possible to buy a Gravity's Revenge CD at MP3.com, not many have.
"We've only sold, like, 10 or so," says Neel. "I think, more or less, they listen to what's on there. I don't really know how many people actually buy the CDs, 'cause they're kind of expensive. With shipping and handling, they're still, like, 10 bucks. And they're not the greatest quality. They're MP3s converted to waves, so they're a little bit less quality than regular CDs."
Of the 40,000 acts on MP3.com, a staggering majority are on the level of a Gravity's Revenge or a Ritual Space Travel Agency.
There are exceptions -- Tori Amos, Public Enemy, Alanis Morissette, Tom Petty and other established artists essentially flirting with a new technology.
But who are the stars of the new technology? There are none. MP3.com has yet to break a Britney Spears or even a Wilco.
So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star? In that case, according to Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, himself an MP3 enthusiast, you're still gonna have to sell your soul to the company.
"You're going to need a traditional label if you want any kind of clout at this point -- if you want to get on the 'Tonight Show' or get major interviews lined up, that sort of thing," he says. "Labels have a way of making those things happen, whereas MP3.com is too small and too young to do that.
"But I love that it does have a sort of young, idealistic, countercultural, iconoclastic approach to the whole thing. I find that refreshing. It's nice to have some alternative to the big five companies out there. They're so big, and they're so corporate and so careful about their moves, and they kind of control what music is. And it's not necessarily what it should be."
MP3, he says, is a good way to get "real" music out there.
He should know. At 58, McGuinn's an MP3 Top 40 regular on a mission to preserve the folk tradition, posting one new home recording of an old folk standard every month.
"I mean, how else would a folk song be in the Top 40? I've had stuff in the MP3 Top 40 for months and months, and it's all traditional stuff that would never get on the Billboard charts," he says. "It's all too carefully controlled."
Having bought his first computer -- a Radio Shack -- in the early '80s, McGuinn has had a Web site up for five years now and spends a lot of time communicating with his public via e-mail.
And that public now includes a generation of fans too young to remember the Byrds.
They know him through his folk songs on the Internet.
"I'm getting a lot of feedback from kids under 20 who wouldn't have heard this stuff," he says. "Everybody who went through the '60s heard these songs, but people from Generation Y haven't heard them and probably wouldn't otherwise. And they're finding them because they're into computers, and they're hanging out on MP3.com, and they're surfing the Web for different stuff, and they run into my site."
McGuinn predicts a day when MP3 technology and online distribution will take the place of record stores, insisting, "It's so much more practical. I mean, why print up pieces of plastic and send them in trucks and put 'em in stores when you can zap the thing over there and have them print it up themselves?"
It may not happen overnight, he says, but it's coming as home computers with built-in CD burners become more affordable.
"People have a little bit of sticker shock," he says. "Anything $500 to $600 -- even that is still too much. When it gets a little lower than that, I think they'll go for it. I mean, they're buying DVD players."
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