 Call it March
madness
Or call it SXSW
Every March, the vibrant
Austin, TX music scene goes into overdrive. For five days,
nearly 24 hours a day, downtown becomes a mad zoo of bodies
buoyed by tired legs and feet, all struggling to cut through
the musical soup around them. Rock bands, acoustic folk
singers, jazz horns, hip-hop beats and country twangs seep
out of bars and night clubs and into the streets, mixing
with cell-phone chatter and the grinding of cars that whiz
by in search of a parking spot.
Welcome
to South by Southwest.
For many, SXSW is a
continuous swirl of excessive drinking, late-night fried
food and second-hand smoke. But it’s also a celebration of
music and the music business. It's where people who love
music congregate to do some schmoozing, strike some deals
and have a whole lot of fun. And of course, it’s an
opportunity to see high-energy performances from legendary
talent and acts on the rise.
When it comes to SXSW, one thing is for certain: You
won't find a bad act here. In fact, you get so spoiled after
a couple of days you start to criticize performances that
would have blown you away anywhere else. The bar is set
pretty high at this conference. That's probably why press,
the industry and music lovers keep showing up year after
year.
Quirky, warm and brimming with bars and clubs, Austin is
uniquely qualified to accommodate the hundreds of sanctioned
and non-sanctioned showcases. Outfitted with a convention
pass, you can get into just about show. This year, big-name
talent such as Elvis Costello, Aimee Mann, Robert Plant, The
New York Dolls, Jason Mraz and Fat Boy Slim shared stages
with up & comers such as The Legendary Shack Shakers,
Jolie Holland, Vienna Teng, Raul Malo (of the Maverick's
fame), renowned NYC-based songwriters Amy Correia and Jesse
Harris (yeah, the guy who wrote five songs on Norah Jones's
multi-platinum album, Come Away With Me, and won a
Grammy for Don't Know Why), played to enthusiastic
fans in incredibly intimate settings.
But there is more to this conference than
exceptional music and free booze. The Austin Convention
Center hosted panel discussions covering nearly every aspect
of the music business and included an exhibit hall featuring
new products and services, as well as awesome album and
poster art and swag at The Flatstock Exhibition.
Across the
street at the Hilton, The Musician's Hotel, organized by
Electronic Musician & Mix Magazine, featured hands-on
demonstrations of products and technologies from Apple,
Mackie, Alesis, Shure, M-Audio, Numark, Akai,
Sensaphonics, and Disc Makers. You could purchase these, and other company
products, in a makeshift store Guitar Center brought directly to the Musician’s Hotel site.
And you could rub
elbows with, and learn tips from, industry giants like
mastering guru Bob Ludwig and guitarist Ronnie Montrose.
Just so you know, I spent a good portion of every day at
the convention center. Really, I did! Here's a little
rundown of all the hard, grueling work I did and what I
learned during the handful of hours of each day that I
wasn't drinking or otherwise rocking out to some band:
I gravitated toward the technology panels because it
is both the biggest threat and the biggest
opportunity for the music industry, depending on who you
ask. As expected, I discovered during these panels that both
the artist and label sides of the biz are still completely
conflicted about peer-to-peer file sharing and what it means
for the future of music. Jay Rosenthal, a music attorney at
the Washington, D.C.-based firm of Berliner, Corcoran &
Rowe and a honcho at the Recording Artists Coalition, didn’t
mince words. "It’s stopping new artists from coming
forward, and it’s killing mid-level artists across the
board," he said. (To be fair, Jay - who I’ve known
for years — also said P2P could present huge opportunities
for artists who want to participate. He just has a problem
with people trading files without artists’ permission).
Rosenthal also said he’s "very much in favor of the
lawsuits" filed by the Recording Industry Association
of America to stop unauthorized downloading because he said
it has started changing attitudes, especially among young
people. "They feel different today," he said.
"They sense that there might be something wrong with
it."
Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a digital rights group
based in San Francisco), countered that the lawsuits haven’t
done much good at all, merely driving file sharing
underground to P2P networks that are even harder to track or
stop. "The lawsuits feel a lot like the days of
prohibition," she said. Seltzer urged parties to stop
bickering and adopt collective licenses or some other
mechanism that allows artists to get paid while letting P2P
and other technologies flourish. She said rapid growth of
Podcasting (see our series on this in the last two issues)
presents "a great opportunity for collective
licensing." The problem, of course, is in the details.
For example, lawyers are still wrangling over whether a
Podcast is a download or a stream, which becomes important
when trying to figure out whether to apply mechanical or
performance royalties. And if it’s subject to performance
royalties, is it a public or private performance? No one
seems to know.
Shawn
Fanning: The Comeback Kid?
Okay, you may have
wondered what ever happened to Shawn Fanning, the founder of
the original Napster. Did he retire to a deserted island?
Did he reject technology in favor of a log cabin in the
Wyoming mountains? Or did Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, so
instrumental in the original Napster’s demise, lock
Fanning up in a torture-chamber somewhere, punishing him in
a creative, death-metal sort of way? The answer is…none of
the above, actually.
Fanning, who showed up to
speak at SXSW, has been hard at work developing audio
fingerprinting technology that copyright owners could use to
track songs bouncing around P2P networks. His new company,
SnoCap launched in December and already has deals with
Universal Music Group and Sony BMG, as well as a cadre of
indie labels, including Absolutely Kosher Records, Artemis
Records/Sheridan Square Entertainment, Gammon Records,
Streetbeat Records/Pandisc/Kriztal Entertainment, Nacional
Records, Nettwerk Records, OM Records/Deep Concentration,
Reality Entertainment and TVT Records. Can you believe it?
Record labels striking deals with the father of file
sharing? You might call it the Shawnshank Redemption
(especially if you’re a writer partial to cheesy
wordplay).
The idea behind SnoCap is to enable artists and labels to
get paid for P2P downloads. From what I hear, the deals are
for the technology and are of course contingent upon it
working. What's still unclear however is how the labels will
collect the royalties for the songs after they use the
fingerprinting technology to track them.
The theory is that identifying which songs are being
downloaded over P2P networks would enable companies to divvy
up royalties based on those downloads. SnoCap has reportedly
been getting a good reception so far despite the notorious
Fanning’s involvement
(Dartboards in offices all along Sunset Boulevard still bear
his visage, after all). In any event, Fanning showed up at
SXSW as a changed man, professing that he wished SnoCap’s
technology was around years ago. "It’s something I
wish would have existed when we were at Napster," he
said. "It would have made this so much easier." Ya
think?
Fanning views SnoCap as a mediator of sorts—helping to
break the logjam between rights holders and the P2P
companies (KaZaa, eDonkey, Grokster, etc.) they despise.
"All of this fear… means the two parties are
deadlocked," he said. "The only way to break that
deadlock is to bring in a third party." As for all that
history with Metallica, Fanning says it was never personal,
and he noted that he ran into Metallica guitarist Kirk
Hammett recently and pitched him on SnoCap. "I think he
was drunk," Fanning said. We would expect no less.
Rockin’
with Ringtones
You may think that
ringtones are boring and, in their current state, they are.
But consider this: Ringtones pulled in $250 million in the
U.S. last year (more than twice that number in Asia &
Europe) and are expected to gross $500 million in 2005.
Interested yet? While ringtones are already a big deal, the
transition from monophonic and polyphonic ringtones (beepy
representations of songs) to master-tone ringtones, which
are actual clips of the master recordings, and ringbacks
(assigning different tunes to each person in your phonebook)
could make them a might big deal in the future.
After all, if someone can download a clip of a song, then
why not the full song in an iTunes-like model? And once
bandwidth is available, why not download a whole album or
just walk around "renting" a stream of music?
Donald Passman, a music attorney with Gang, Tyre, Ramer
& Brown in Beverly Hills, Calif., wondered aloud whether
anyone will need an iPod when people can "just dial it
up and listen to it" on a cell phone.
Indeed, those in the know are
pretty excited about the potential to turn mobile phones
into music centers. "This is your new point of
sale," boldly stated Mark Frieser, CEO of NYC-based
research firm Consect.
"Forget about record
stores." A bold statement indeed for, the truth is that
cell phones aren’t quite ready to grab the mantle yet.
Current bandwidth
constraints and handset storage issues now hinder
mobile phones in that regard—but the technology
progresses every day. And while ringtones are largely a
phenomenon for major-label acts, that’s also changing.
Indie bands can already make their own ringtones with
software such as Xingtone Music and make them available to
their fans. (Scott Andrews, senior director of Internet and
mobile entertainment at BMI, predicted that bands could send
out ringtones to concert goers via a wireless Bluetooth
connection. Pretty cool, eh?).
Other panel topics included booking, management and
contract issues, as well as pointers on how emerging artists
can market themselves on a budget. In addition, organizers
set up a series of sessions in which A&R folks listened
and evaluated demo submissions. The broad range of topics
was a lot to take in. All the more reason that people come
year and year. At SXSW, there’s always something new to
learn. Of course, I readily admit that I also had some fun
in between those moments of cognitive activity. Okay. I had a
lot of fun. And to paraphrase Sheryl Crow, I got a
feeling I’m not the only one.
(Mike
Grebb is a writer, journalist and singer/songwriter
based in Washington, D.C. He has written for numerous
publications, including Wired
and Billboard. He just completed his debut solo
record, Resolution, which is available at www.mikegrebb.com).
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