Back to the press section...

Business In Vancouver Magazine

July 6th - 12th 1999

This is a complete (and again, unauthorized) transcription of an interview that appeared in Business In Vancouver Magazine. They managed to misquote both me and Jeff Grant. Cool. I'll make an erratum statement at the end. Listen Up: Nettwerk Productions' Adam Drake (r) and Jeff Grant (l) do not feel sales are threatened by Internet freebies. Fears in the music industry that MP3 technology, which produces close to CD-quality sound on the Web, would reduce music sales have failed to materialize, said Nettwerk Productions Web developer Adam Drake. Artists signed to the Vancouver-based label include Sarah McLachlan, Delerium and Tara MacLean. Drake believes that by giving away free sound bites and previews from artists' records, the Internet gives new performers exposure they would otherwise never get. "It is my opinion that MP3's are never going to kill the music industry. It gives great exposure to lesser known artists. Each medium, whether it is a CD or a Liquid Audio player [needed to download and play an MP3 file] will always have a unique audience. People still like to read magazines, to leaf through the artwork, to feel the texture of the paper," said Drake. Nettwerk is so confident of the promotional value of its internet strategy that it has just launched its own Internet radio station devoted to its own artists. Nettradio features singles from Nettwerk label artists in both MP3 and Liauid Audio format as well as prerecorded staff DJ programs. Listeners will be able to create their own playlists or preview tracks from upcoming releases such as Sarah McLachlan's Mirrorball. Nettwerk IT manager Jeff Grant says the site will be strictly a promotional tool: no advertising space will be sold. "We have documented cases where people have gone to our site and gone out and purchased a CD. Newspaper ads [to promote new artists] take a lot of money. Usually, you would hire tagging crews of five or six kids to go into an area and hand out free tapes or CD's to inner city kids. MP3 allows us to do that in a virtual sense. One song put on the web spreads fast. We have given away one song, but the band gets name recognition," said Grant. He speculates that the opposition to the technology comes from middlemen who make money on distribution. "They are threatened because they will have to come up with a new distribution model," said Grant. Nevertheless, he admits that the quality of sound available onlinethrough Nettwerk is deliberately kept slightly below that of a CD. He described his attempts at implementing a secure e-commerce system on Nettwerk's Web sites as frustrating. "In the U.S., where there are a lot of online banks, we would have a turnkey solution and after two hours we would be up and running. I have been working on implementing this system for eight months," said Grant. He even toyed with the idea of runnning Canadian online orders through a U.S. virtual bank: "But the comptroller said that was not even an option," he joked. Nettwerk's Web site is www.nettwerk.com.

The errors in this article are as follows: Each medium, whether it is a CD or a Liquid Audio player [needed to download and play an MP3 file] will always have a unique audience. That's wrong for a fairly major reason: Liquid Audio is a streaming audio solution, not an MP3 player or downloading utility. You would actually need two things to play MP3 files: a decent web browser (or FTP client, or chat client, etc. anything which could grab files from the web) and MP3 player software of some sort. LiquidAudio's player will only allow you to play LiquidAudio files at the moment. And rightly so, since it's their proprietary format. People still like to read magazines, to leaf through the artwork, to feel the texture of the paper," said Drake. They jumbled several things into that misquotation: I was attempting to make the comparison that everyone in the print industry was up in arms when Time and Wired started publishing online versions of their print magazines on the web. Everyone was saying "Well there goes the written word." But that obviously hasn't happened. So I said that people would always buy a magazine - particularly something esoteric like Ray-Gun or Wired - simply because of the care that goes into making the printed edition. There is a lot of thought put into the font, the layout, the design, the paper choice, etc. So the comparison was completed when I was trying to get across that people will always enjoy congregating in record stores, and buying something physical that they can hold in their hands. Something like Delerium's album where the artwork is awesome, and the paper quality again is a statement about the music inside. This quotation, as printed, looks like I'm just jumbling things. :/ Usually, you would hire tagging crews of five or six kids to go into an area and hand out free tapes or CD's to inner city kids. MP3 allows us to do that in a virtual sense. Again: completely misquoted. What Jeff actually said was that major labels like Arista or Warner / Reprise - with whom we have artists represented in the U.S. market - have in the past used tagging crews in this way to get CD singles promoted at the street level. This quotation makes it sound like Grant personally went out there and hired tagging crews for Nettwerk to get their singles heard by the kids. :/ Totally wrong.

© 2009,