So you want to be a rock’n’roll star? Just turn on, upload and cash in, says Neil McIntosh
The route for up-and-coming bands used to be well defined. By night, groups that dreamed of being spotted by passing record company executives would sweat it out in dingy clubs and pubs. By day they’d stick their demo cassettes in the post to record companies and the BBC’s John Peel.
Now it’s more complicated, thanks to the Internet. First, bands started using the Web to market themselves and their music. Then came MP3 technology, which allows songs to be sent over the Internet, stored and played on computers and portable equipment. In theory this lets bands bypass the record label altogether.
Now there is a third way, courtesy of former Talking Heads keyboard player Jerry Harrison and the site he has helped to create, garageband.com. It plans to use the Web’s multimedia capabilities and its ability to gather instant feedback to create the ultimate battle of the bands.
Groups can upload their songs to the site for review by music-savvy Net users. Every month the band that wins the best reviews will collect a $250 000 recording contract with garageband.com’s own label. The site is oriented to the United States, but British hopefuls should start saving for a digital recording kit: it plans to launch in Britain this time next year.
Users register at www.garageband. com, stating their musical tastes. On each visit they are given a new song to review within their chosen genres, which can be any combination of pop and rock, alternative, dance, hip-hop, rap and R&B.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Zito, garageband.com’s chief executive, says great care has gone into ensuring that ardent fans, friends and family cannot ”stuff the ballot boxes”.
”When you come on to the site you’ll be given a song, and you have to review that – you do not get to choose,” he says.
Garageband.com uses streaming audio, so that users hear the songs more quickly. But quality can be compromised, depending on the speed of the user’s connection.
The most innovative part of the operation is the proprietary database that underpins the site. It has been programmed by the former Netscape Netcenter head of research, Dr Amanda Lathroum Welsh, who is now president of garageband.com.
The Lathroum Comparater Engine can ask listeners questions and assign their answers numeric values, which are added and ranked.
”It is all very scientific,” says Zito. ”It incorporates a tonne of statistical theory, and is running on two Sun 4 000 computers.
And every time people come in and vote on something, it instantly recalculates the whole chart. It all happens in real time.”
The database is powerful enough for the company to work out which kind of music appeals to which demographic groups – a strong commercial tool. The capability of the software is a key element in the company’s business model.
”That’s based on three things,” says Zito. ”One, we are an aggregator of eyeballs – both musicians and people who love music. Two, we are a music company that sells music. And three, we see ourselves as a market research company.
”For example, one record company has already come to us and said, ‘Hey, we have an album that we have just done by a new, first-time band, and we don’t know which single to put out from this record’.
”We’ve taken the 11 songs from that record and thrown them in anonymously with all our songs. The record company will put out as a single whichever song is ranked the highest.”
There are possibilities outside the world of music for the new engine, especially now that the Internet is a mainstream medium.
”The demographics of the Web user in the US are now exactly parallel to the demographics of the normal population,” Zito says.
”There used to be a great fear that if you tested stuff on the Internet you’d get very skewed results because it was a self-selecting sample of people who were not typically representative of the population. That’s no longer true in the US.”
Garageband.com will soon include radio and video, sent to tightly controlled demographic groups.
”Advertisers will be able to make some very sensible decisions on how to spend their money,” Zito says.
And this being the Web, the hundreds of thousands of amateur reviewers signing up for garageband.com know there is something in it for them. As well as hearing the latest sounds before their friends, they will be given ”frequent reviewer points” which will be exchangeable for a range of goodies, from $50 CD tokens to a new Apple iMac.