Future exploration of music landscape will require online sources

The music industry as we know it may well disappear."

So says Reebee Garofalo, a media and technology professor at the University of Massachusetts.

New technologies change the structure of things, he said, and the new technology now making waves in the industry is the ability of artists to reach their fans directly by using Internet sites like MySpace.com.

Garofalo said it is widely recognized that the future of the music industry is in digital music files and the Internet. But while the major labels are busy trying to police their copyrights, listeners and musicians are finding new ways to connect and share music.

Local innovations with local music

A group of Brigham Young University students saw the potential of music on the Web and has come up with its own business model. The Web site is called SomethingLocal.com, where local artists can get the word out and sell their music. SomethingLocal is looking to be an entry-level Internet music label for Wasatch Front artists.

"We're trying to bridge the gap between local music and big producers, and we've got to fulfill needs on both ends," said John Keller, one of the site's founders. "Local music is not something that is controlled by the major labels. You can't get this music anywhere else."

Bands sign an agreement allowing SomethingLocal to sell and promote their music. The site hosts pages for about 55 local bands and offers streams of their songs for free. Listeners can check out local concert times and buy songs, CDs or mobile phone ringtones (all from local artists).

"We're trying to help them make money," said Dennison Harris, another of the site's founders. "The music scene here is as talented as you'll find."

Harris also noted that, unfortunately, Utah County's abundance of students and large families often means there isn't enough money to spend on luxuries like concerts or mobile phone ringtones.

In the future, Keller envisions launching independent music videos from the site and taking bands on tour. The problem is, most of the site's founders are still in school, and it's hard to have both a successful business and good grades.

"We're hoping to get straight 'D's," Harris said.

Still, the students have tapped into what many consider to be a growing trend in the music industry.

The future of the music industryfi

Patrick Burkart, a communication professor at Texas A&M and author of the upcoming book "Digital Music Wars" with Tom McCourt, said the future of t he industry is in music as a service, not music as a product.

"I think we're already being trained to get past the idea that music is something we buy or own," Burkart said. "Music is probably going to be bundled together more and more with other kinds of products and services. I don't see music staying an independent, stand-alone offering for much longer."

Garofalo sees this shift in format as being similar to the shift from sheet music to records, or from records and cassettes to CDs. One type of media replaces another, and the industry adapts.

Historically, the major music labels have relied on their vast promotion and distribution networks to build an oligopoly in the American CD market. The music groups Sony-BMG, Universal-Vivendi, EMI and Warner account for about 85 percent of all music sales in the U.S.

Artists sign exclusive contracts with these labels to produce and distribute their music even though many artists feel the contracts are unfair. The artist pays for the production of the CD and music videos, signs over the copyrights to the songs, and usually gets about a dollar a CD in royalties.

And until now, such a contract has been the model of success in the music world. But since file sharing and virtual communities have made it possible for musicians to do their own marketing and distribution, the major labels are having to adjust.

Wired magazine gives an example of how the new Internet business model works. The band Hawthorne Heights, a quintet from Dayton, Ohio, went from relative obscurity to touring the country in a plush bus in just a couple of years. Band members did it without radio airplay or TV spots. Their brand of punk left the mainstream music scene some time ago, so they didn't attract any interest from major record labels.

But from the time it recorded its debut album in September 2003 to its release in July 2004, the band used the Web site MySpace.com to build up a list of nearly 200,000 "friends" -- a direct-marketing fan list any major label would kill for. The CD was released through Victory Records, and by now it has sold 500,000 copies.

Reuters reports that MySpace.com has grown from 2 million registered users a year and a half ago to more than 35 million users now -- 550,000 of whom are musicians. The site is the fourth most-viewed site on the Web, ahead of Google, Hotmail and AOL. It hosts 12 percent of all advertising on the Internet, more than any other site.

"It's a great deal for artists," Burkart said. "They're not locked into any kind of exclusivity arrangement yet. They can blend their own marketing with their music, however they see fit. It's very empowering in the short run."

In the long run, however, bands not only need lists of fans, they need those fans to continue buying their music. MySpace doesn't sell anything to its users -- it's just a way to reach people.

'On the way down'

Bigger bands are also seeing the advantages of the do-it-yourself system. Tad Kinchla, drummer for the band Blues Traveler, called the major label system archaic.

"I think the big record labels are on the way down," Kinchla said. "There's a means for distribution that doesn't rely on them, and it's a worldwide means."

The means Kinchla is referring to made its first splash in 2000, when the file-sharing software called Napster became wildly popular. The software allowed users to share music files with each other with no regard for price or copyright.

Several lawsuits forced Napster to disappear, but several other file-sharing software programs took its place. Recently, Napster 2 has reappeared as a pay-per-track and subscription music service, much like RealNetwork's Rhapsody.

The grandfather of the pay-per-track business model, however, is Apple's iTunes music service. It reached 400 million downloads in mid-2005.

After paying royalty rates and other fees to musicians and their labels, iTunes doesn't make money from the service itself, but it does make money selling iPods. The small devices can hold thousands of songs, display photos, and even play videos.

But the MySpace business model hasn't taken the industry as much by surprise as Napster did in 2000. Major label acts like Coldplay, Mariah Carey, and the Black Eyed Peas have all used MySpace.com to stream songs from their CDs before they were released, and all of them debuted near the top of the Billboard charts.

"The big labels will always have something the smaller labels don't have, and that's the ability to invest and to promote the artist they sign," said longtime musician and producer Jim Messina, of the 1970s duo Loggins & Messina. "It helps the artist get going a lot quicker in terms of the advertising dollars. On the other hand, you pay for that, because your royalty rates are a lot lower."

Messina's comment hints at what may be the most significant impact of the Internet on musicians -- it gives more of them the ability to make a living.

Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa bought the copyrights to his songs back from Sony-BMG and now does his own promotion and distribution.

"I sell more copies now than I did when I was on a major label," Bonamassa said. "It's our people doing it, instead of some major operation."

He said he sells about 80,000 CDs a year -- a miserable failure by major label standards, but enough for him to make a living when most of the profits go to him instead of a corporation.

Conversely, local group Ryan Shupe and the RubbberBand recently signed a deal with Capitol Records Nashville. Having their own tour bus is a sort of dream come true, but being with a major label has changed a few things for the band.

"We're never home and we make less money," said Collin Botts, who plays bass and sings for the band. "It's almost like we're starting over. The band had worked for years to build up a following. Now we're playing for audiences that have never heard us before."

And maybe that's the price you pay to become famous. The major music labels can still turn a musician into a superstar much better than the Internet can.

But for musicians whose music doesn't reach a broad audience, finding fans and selling music on the Internet is like a new window of opportunity. Artists who can't sell 100,000 CDs in a weekend have no chance on a major label, but the Internet has given them the opportunity to make a living on their own.

"That's the success story that America is all about," Messina said. "The little guy gets a chance to come up to bat and hit a home run."

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C1.