Thursday, February 19, 2004

Internet shelf space and mind space for music Rockers Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno recently announced the formation of a group called MUDDA (Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists"). The idea is to allow musicians to bypass the big studios by making their work available to their fans for download at a price. The hope is that, by eliminating the middleman, these musicians would be able to interact directly with their fans and make a reasonable profit for themselves. Considering that much of their base is now getting much of their music through downloads (legal or not) rather than through stores, that makes sense. It makes even more sense as specialized music stores that cater to anything but the Wal-Mart audience are going under, (even Tower Records), and since the ever-weakening record companies are only interested in blockbusters, there may be no other way. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out ("Musicians to Use Internet To Bypass Record Labels," 1/26/2004), the rock band Phish has already been one of the pioneers in this regard, selling downloads of its live concerts. The band thus helps fill up its actual concerts, and also reportedly has made over $2 million since 2002. MUDDA will both offer its own download services and work with established download sources such as Apple's iTunes. This may be another blow to the record oligopoly. It will be interesting to see if this end-run around the big record companies works. The problem and the opportunity are the same. The Internet offers infinite shelf space, so that all kinds of music in all kinds of formats can be supported. The overhead costs are minimal, and the ability to cater to very specific tastes is there. All that is wonderful, if the costs can be made moderate and the restrictions on use less onerous. (iTunes downloads, for example, are restricted to Apple MPC players, something that makes it far more limited than a CD, that you play anywhere and tape for personal use legally.) But the one thing that record companies are sort of good at is creating mind space. Granted, they're not really very good at it, unless the music follows certain formulas and the musicians fit into one of a few clichéd roles. The record companies are mostly a machine for paying payola to ClearChannel and setting up concert tours, Grammy appearances, or MTV video showings. But the Internet is not a very good place for developing mind space for unknowns. Yes, Gabriel, Eno, Phish, and many others that are already famous will have no trouble selling on the Web. But if this encourages thousands of new artists (great and terrible) to grab some of the virtual shelf space, you have to wonder how they will get found. Getting traction even for excellent music, will take marketing, and that's something few artists are good at doing from scratch. As it is, most recordings that make it to official label status get no recognition and no sales. I wonder whether a service like MUDDA can penetrate through the anonymity of the endless shelves. In some ways, every Web site not connected to a famous institution has this problem, including a blog like Oligopoly Watch. Whatever the merits of the site, who will ever find it? Fortunately, search engines like Google or Yahoo easily found this site, and directed many searchers from across the world to the site. If they liked it, and a growing number do, they might come back for more. But there's no real equivalent for a music site (except for the mention of a known artists or very specific genre (say, Greek dance music or country punk). The question is whether most music will even be found. 6:05:14 PM

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