The Web isn't an easy link to musical stardom

By GEMMA TARLACH
of the Journal Sentinel staff
Last Updated: Jan. 20, 2001

The Net is alive with the sound of music - and the frustrated sighs of musicians and would-be starmakers who are learning that fame and fortune come no faster in cyberspace than in the real world.

Just a year ago, Web sites such as Riffage.com were bragging they'd be the first to break a band online - and bands by the bucketful were signing up with stars in their eyes. But Wall Street's recent dot.com crash and the sheer number of music sites - and the sheer volume of bands uploading their music onto those sites - have made online music's Next Big Thing anything but a sure thing.

For bands, the promise of the Internet was to get a global audience turned on to your music with little expense on your part. Musicians found out quickly it was a premise too good to be true.

Web start-ups already have found out the hard way that if you build a site, they will not necessarily come.

"When things first started going, if you had a URL and an idea, there were companies lining up to invest in you," said Mike Mena, vice president for artist development at MusicBlitz.com. "How you'd make money was a question a lot of people forgot to ask."

As a result, several heavily hyped outfits, including Riffage.com and AtomicPop.com, have gone out of business.

Scour.com, a site similar to the free music swap site Napster, filed for bankruptcy in October 2000; the site has since been bought by Centerspan, which plans to launch a new, "legal" version this spring.

Other sites, such as Listen.com and MTVi.com, have laid off 25% or more of their staff.

A Successful Exception

A Wisconsin band can tell one of the few stories of Internet-driven breakthroughs.

"The Net provides access for everyone in the world to hear you - and it provides access for every musician in the world to put up their music," said Matthew Kramer, drummer for the Madison-based band Monovox.

Kramer compared the overcrowded Net to vying for limited club dates with other local bands - only with the Internet, "now millions of other bands are doing the same thing."

Monovox has been far luckier than most young acts testing the Internet waters; the pop-rock quartet's Cinderella story shows the Internet can be a helpful tool for baby bands.

In late 1999, Monovox uploaded a few songs to the then-new Garageband.com.

Unlike most unsigned band sites, which throw lots of listening options at their audience but offer little else, Garageband.com lets users rate songs. The site compiles charts and, four to six times a year, awards $250,000 recording contracts to the most popular acts.

Monovox walked away with one of those quarter-mil contracts in February. Producer and former Talking Head Jerry Harrison, who co-founded Garageband.com, signed up to produce the band's as-yet-untitled album, which was recorded in San Francisco last fall.

Monovox and the site are in negotiations with the majors to distribute the disc, which will be on the Garageband.com label, by this summer.

For Monovox, winning the Garageband.com deal was a huge boost to the band's career - but not a substitute for more traditional paths to success.

"We know we wouldn't have recorded a full-length album on our own because it's too expensive," said Monovox guitarist Matthew Schaeffer. "(Plus) you want to get a label to get you the booking agents, the publicity, to get your record in stores. We want to tour, and you need the support of a label to do that."

"Music is still traditional," Schaeffer added. "Bands still have to go play in front of people and put on a good show."

Harrison, a Shorewood native, agreed.

"I never thought the Net would replace the mechanisms already in place, such as radio," said Harrison.

'Infotainment medium'

What is new about the Net - and seen most obviously in successful sites such as Garageband.com - is a level of interaction that enhances, rather than replaces, more established channels of entertainment.

"The Web is an iceberg that we're just seeing the tip of," said Harrison, noting that a global voting site such as Garageband.com would be impossible without the Internet. "The comeuppance of Nasdaq has slowed down the whole migration to the Net, but I think the Net is still providing opportunities never seen before."

Other industry insiders agreed that a slowing stock market and the Net's newness require bands and those who would support them to proceed with caution.

"Half of what we do is offline," said MusicBlitz.com's Mena. "We're firm believers in what the Net can do for the music industry, but we also know that the tired and true - touring, radio airplay - are also important."

Mena and other online orchestrators of breaking bands believe the Web is still too young to wrest control of pop music away from the labels.

"At present, the Internet is still an infotainment medium - not the entertainment medium which it will probably be in a few years," said Andre Schnoor, CEO of BeSonic.com, a rising star in free online music.

Based in Germany, where it's the No. 1 music site, and available in five languages, BeSonic.com draws roughly 20% of its traffic from the United States. But Schnoor believes neither the music industry nor fans are ready to embrace the Internet as fully as television or radio - which means that a band is unlikely to break online first.

"Laying back and passively inhaling the charisma of a 'star' in action is something that works perfectly on TV - (but) while surfing the Net you're in a more interactivestate: browsing, searching and testing," Schnoor said via e-mail. "Another thing is that the development of a star takes time. The online music scene is still very young. Many of today's stars were around for many years before they finally broke through."

Neither new bands nor sites eager to promote them are waiting for the Net to mature, however.

"The playing field was not even for bands not affiliated with a major label, or without deep pockets - that's changing," said MusicBlitz.com's Mena. "It used to be so difficult to get anything into Rolling Stone. It still is, but now you can also try RollingStone.com, which is updated daily instead of every other week."

Fans online

Milwaukee/Madison-based Capstone has wrangled the Web to its advantage with an aggressive strategy. The band sold out its first album through Amazon.com and has developed an e-mail list of about 4,000 fans nationwide. Its official fan club is online only, run by a fan in New Hampshire who, like many Capstone followers, got interested in the band because Capstone made the first move.

"Right now, the Net is set up more for bands to go looking for fans than the other way around," said Capstone front man Michal Ashby. "It gets a little confusing for music fans. You have to weed through a lot of music that's not very good, or not in the right category."

Capstone members use America Online's member preferences to find the e-mail addresses of fans of music similar to theirs, such as the signed bands Korn and Linkin Park. Capstone then e-mails the potential fans with a link to the band's home page, CapstoneMusic.com.

Capstone, like Monovox, has realized that the Internet only opens doors, and getting the band through them must be done by more conventional means. Capstone has had two No. 1 hits on Garageband.com's rap/rock chart, for example, but has gotten the biggest buzz from radio stations playing the single "1314."

"Radio airplay helps and promotes our music more than anything," said Ashby. "When you hear something on the radio - it could be me and the guys or it could be Creed - you still think hey, they're on the radio, they must be a big band."

In February, Capstone will head back out to Los Angeles to showcase for several A&R representatives. It's part of the band's plan to translate Internet buzz into a real-world deal.

"Unless a band is really unbelievable, (breaking big online) is not going to happen without the support of the labels," said Ashby. "You're still looking at labels viewing the Net as competition. You're starting to see labels selling downloadable music, but they're not jumping in with both feet. I think there's a fear of being the first."

Both bands and music Web sites recognize that initial predictions about the Internet supplanting the major labels entirely were off the mark.

While it's possible to develop a regional or even modest national following through touring and sustain your fan base online, any band striving for more needs the backing of a major label.

"The major labels have a strong enough infrastructure and hold enough copyrights that they will be part of the solution," said Harrison.

No guarantees

As major labels sort out their involvement with the Internet, the success of free music swap sites such as Napster has tempered young bands' enthusiasm for the very media that once promised them the world.

"I worry that Napster has devalued music," said Monovox's Schaeffer. "Will someone who downloaded my song for free (from Napster) be willing to pay for a ticket to my concert?"

Smart bands already have grasped that being online is a necessary step to success.

"It reminds me of a time back in the Talking Heads where we realized we not only had to make music but also videos," noted Harrison.

But it's not a guarantee.

"We think of the Internet as a sine wave, continuously going up and down," said Capstone's Ashby, undaunted more than one near-deal falling through for the band. "We'll get an e-mail from a label saying 'we want you to do this and this' and then the next message will be 'you're nothing.' It's just like exchanging phone messages or mailing. The Net is just a more immediate way to find out."

As for a band breaking on the Internet despite all indicators otherwise, well, never say never.

"There will always be the freak of nature that's made in a garage (and becomes a massive success)," said Harrison. "That's one of the interesting things about the music industry. No matter how much money and influence it has, it can never plan the future."

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Jan. 21, 2001.