FUTURE SOUND
music and technology column
as featured in Real Groove Magazine
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Little Bit Country....
(Real Groove October 2000) A recent report in Billboard highlighted the fierce competition online between Country music websites, mentioning that several of the bigger sites were looking at consolidating their brands, and polishing their revenue models. I was surprised by the dollar sums these sites were talking about, with anticipated incomes in the millions of dollars, based on current earnings and so on. This probably doesn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with music, but hey, it's a business so what are you going to do? And of course, Country music is big business in the States; you only have to look at the Billboard charts to see the number of top selling artists that are from this particular genre. It may not be 'hip', but it sells truckloads. The sites mentioned by Billboard included www.Country.com, www.CountryCool.com, and www.MusicCountry.com, all of which are pretty slick efforts. It's hard to see just how they make their money, but obviously there's some serious backers out there. Given how little country music makes it into the charts here, you often forget just how big an influence it is on the American charts. Imusic Newsagent (www.imusic.com/newsagent) features several country music news sites on its daily round up of music news headlines from about a dozen music sites, ranging from NME.co.uk to hip hop and rock news sites. There's www.CountryNow.com, and Country Standard Time. At www.thankyouforthemusic.com there's even recipes from Phyllis and her Country Kitchen - this week's recipe is Cloud Nine Salad, tucked in there among all the country music news and interviews from an avid fan. If mainstream country is not your bag, try some alt country sites like No Depression magazine's site, which features archives of interviews going back to their first issue from 1995. It covers bands such as Uncle Tupelo (gumbopages.com/uncle-tupelo.html), and their offshoots Wilco and Son Volt Another fan site that mines this particular vein is www.freighttrainboogie.com. It's done with the devotion and passion of a true fan, who also runs a net based radio show through the site. The site features this quote; "Gram Parsons said 'there is no boundary between types of music... I see two types of sounds - good ones and bad ones'". I don't know what it is, but most of the time I find websites put together by fans are generally ten times better than the official band site. Maybe it's the passion, maybe it's the commitment, maybe it's because it's not some record company hack regurgitating some out of date press release. My favourite fan site that I've come across is a wonderfully informative site about Sly and the Family Stone (see Troy Fergusons Helter Skelter column in last months Real Groove). at www.slyfamstone.com. The guy behind this site is one Jonathan Dakks, a major science boffin whose passion for the music of Sly Stone is a wonderful thing to behold. Apparently Sly heard about this site a few years back, and made contact with it's author. Sly invited this enterprising young man out to visit him in CA, and to help him with his own computer, so he could look at the site. Under the link 'What' Sly up to now' is the tale of Dakks trip to meet his hero. While Dakks was sitting in Sly's studio working on his computer, Sly started jamming at the keyboard, working away on a tune which Dakks describes as easily as funky as any of his old material. Dakks says that Sly is in good health, and writing music all the time, contrary to popular rumours of Sly’s reclusiveness and alleged reliance on drugs. But with a legacy like his, I guess he's in no rush to release anything new, until he feels like it. Russell Brown, get down. Recently labelled as 'Hot' by Metro magazine for Hard News, his incisive weekly political commentary slot on Radio 95BFM. Russell Brown started out as a newspaper journalist on the Mainland, before moving to the Big Smoke to take up the post of Assistant Editor at Rip It Up. He lived and worked in the UK for several years, before returning here with partner Fiona Rae in the early nineties, working first as Editor of Planet magazine, then moving into writing about computers and the internet for various publications such as the Listener, Computerworld and Unlimited. I emailed Russell a few questions to find out a few of his favourite surfing moves. Hang ten, Russell. How long have you been surfing the net? Since 1994. I bought a 14.4k modem from Iconz at the beginning of 1995 and was kind of own my own after that. It was pretty unfriendly - you logged onto a shell account on their Unix machine and you were expected to know an array of arcane Unix commands just to handle your email. Why did you start using the net? I had begun writing the Computer column for the Listener and so it was an obvious thing to do - but there was quite a bit of resistance to me writing about it as much as I did. Some people thought it was all hype and that consumer CD-Roms were what I should be devoting my attention to. I think I was right. One of the key reasons I was so keen to explore it was because I was a freelancer and I was conscious of not having access to the same resources as people who worked in big offices. The Internet seemed like the way to get those resources for myself. What's the main changes you've seen since you first started using the net? It's gone from a difficult command-line interface to a place to watch movies. My typical download speed now is about 1000 times what it was in 1994. Back then, traffic cost $12 a megabyte - at those prices my current usage would cost me $18,000 a month. Those changes have helped the shift from it being a fringe pursuit to being almost pervasive. We have very high rates of Internet usage in New Zealand. It's been interesting seeing it go from being dismissed by business to basically determining the future of business. Has your use of the net changed over time? It got very boring and functional for a while, because it's a tool of trade for me. I try now to remember to use it recreationally too - sites like ifilm.com. I spend less time in newsgroups than I used to, but I'm still ona good little mailing list where we argue about rugby. Our household uses it for information all the time. What sites do you and your family visit regularly, for entertainment, information, and fun? I news edit IDGNet NZ (www.idg.net.nz) so I'm there a lot. I read all the local news sites: the Herald, Scoop (which hosts my Hard News bulletin), NewsRoom and, lately, the horribly-named Stuff. Ifilm.com, The Guardian Website and Arts & Letters Daily less often. Macintouch, Macsurfer, and MacOS Rumors, Slashdot, Wired. Fiona replies: I use television sites for looking up stuff about telly progs for work, such as Zap2it.com (horrible name, it used to be ultimatetv.com), epguides.com, rickontv.com, bbc.co.uk or the American network sites, like abc.com - anywhere I can find info I need about a show (often find good fan sites). Also look at my favourite, guardianunlimited (especially filmunlimited - fantastic). News, I look at Herald, INSIDE, Ain't It Cool News. The kids like FoxKids,cartoonnetwork.com, disney.com, lego.com, squirt.co.nz - basically, anything with good games! I browse occasionally at Flying Pig, and have bought books, but sometimes prices aren't that comparable. Also do most banking online - I can make transfers between accounts really easily, rather than farting around with bits of paper at the bank. How much time on an average day do you spend on the net? Overall, including publishing to our Website and doing email, 2-8 hours a day. If I've been in front of computer a lot during the week, I might avoid it at the weekends, or just do a quick email check. I'm not one of those people who can't be away from it for a day. Is there fierce competition to get onto a computer in your house? Do you monitor where the kids visit? (Netnanny or similar software, or good old fashioned 'adult supervision') I've wondered about some kind of netnanny thing for our more adventurous 6 year-old. It's faintly possible that he could accidentally click his way to something offensive from a games site or something, and he has a right to be protected from that for a while. But our computers are right by the living area, so it's not like they're tucked away. The kids like us to sit down with them anyway. What's it like watching your kids grow up with computers as part of their natural environment (something that perhaps wasn't so prevalent in your own generation?) Their whole relationship with media is quite different to ours. When I was a kid, you basically caught something when it was screened on TV and then it was gone. Our kids were born after the VCR and they fully expect to be able to copy and repeat anything they like. So already they're coming into the Internet with interesting expectations about control of media. Could you live without the net/email, and what’s the longest you've gone without touching a computer (ie on holiday)? I'd live, but life would suck without Internet access - apart from anything else I depend on the Internet for news more than any other medium these days. I've gone a couple of weeks without, when away on holiday - and come back to an absolute mountain of email. |
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© 2000 Peter McLennan |