By Beatrice De GeaMusic Fans Gain Control : The Impact of the CD
The big screen has a map of the United States and, with a click of a mouse, it is filled with red dots, more than 50,000 of them, spread through every state but clustered in metropolitan areas like hot spots on a thermal chart. The dots represent music fans, mostly teens, mostly male, and they are part of a curious and potent community that finds its hub at the website of StreetWise Concepts & Culture.
StreetWise uses the members to market and promote bands, new films, video games and anything else that skews toward youth, and the members in turn get cool merchandise, backstage passes, and most interestingly, a big say in the shaping of products and projects before they reach the public.
The company is the brainchild of David “Beno” Benveniste, also the manager for System of a Down. The early, grass-roots promotion of that band led to the StreetWise model, but now the company has been contracted to use the same “viral” approach for Radiohead, Nokia, Coca Cola, NASCAR and many others. The lifestyle and wants of the new music fan may be a riddle to major record companies, but they are the basic programming at StreetWise.
“Look, the kids are so smart these days, they can find, retrieve, disseminate, produce any piece of music or technology now on the Internet. They can take a song, send it to a friend in North Africa, remix it how they want, make their own video for it and make it their own. And that technology makes them so powerful. It’s not about the radio programmers anymore or promoters. It’s about a kid in homeroom in Iowa now. Everything is different now.”
Still, the currency of the music industry remains the compact disc, and that is a problem. Sales of the CD are down 20% since 2000 and a major comeback is as likely as a boom in Laserdisc sales. In a wry twist, the CD itself is one major reason the business finds itself in dire straits today. The embracing of that format in the 1980’s sparked a huge boom in profits as the digital quality and durability of the silvery discs inspired many consumers to replace their vinyl collections.
The windfall made the business more attractive to multinational conglomerates and led to huge investment. As profits waned, though, consolidation and a more strident corporate ethos pervaded. The “art” of music would now, more than ever, have to pay off on a quarterly basis. That set the stage for crisis when consumers, who have long complained about the price of albums, abruptly found MP3 computer technology in the late 1990’s, an avenue for snatching any song they wanted for free. File sharing, via Napster and similar services, created a new model that the industry has yet to figure out.
The chaos inspires in some a belief that better times are ahead, not just for fans but also for artists and the business thinkers willing to jettison the view that giving away music is tantamount to condoning high-tech shoplifting. One of those thinkers is Benveniste. While many in the industry have been scrambling to halt file sharing (indeed the Recording Industry Association of America is now pursuing hundreds of subpoenas that would force internet service providers to reveal the names of particularly prolific online music bandits), Benveniste exults in mailing out free music to fans and creating as much Internet buzz as possible.
“The record companies had been way up in the air, far away, and they don’t have tentacles down into the street, down into the boiling area below,” he said. “Look, you can either fight all this-and loose-or realize that if you have a band that is blowing up with kids online, you will find ways to make money.”
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