Philip Hayward
The most common use of the Internet by music agencies to date, has been the establishment of sites dedicated to particular bands or labels. These most commonly feature text information on music product, tour schedules etc. together with graphic elements (such as CD cover designs, artist's photos etc.) and sound and / or music video samples. This use marks the music industry's least problematic — and least creative — use of the Internet, the use of web sites as electronic brochures for artists and releases. These are designed to cater for, stimulate and thereby create, fan-bases - nourishing consumer interest in product. As a promotional form, the sites fit into, draw on and often directly assemble themselves from, existing promotional materials (ie publicity kits, press ads, cover designs and music videos). There is nothing disruptive about this use of the medium for marketing and, in its present form, it offers a low-cost, free-to-place adjunct to existing marketing operations. Many aficionado sites fulfil a similar function, serving as fan promotions of favoured artists and often comprise more basic approximations of music industry sites — often in the form of virtual 'bedroom wall' displays (see for instance the Brian Ferry / Roxy Music site 'Madness In My Soul'3). By contrast, befitting the multi-faceted nature of its subject, 'The (unofficial) Eno Web'4 site offers more in-depth textual documentation, interviews etc. alongside basic still photographic images and discographies. The Eno site is, however in a distinct minority.
The novelty of the Internet, and the varying alacrity of major industry players to embrace the new medium, have offered minor and/or 'independent'5 recording companies a (limited, and arguably temporary) opportunity to attract attention to their operation, artists and product by establishing attractive web sites. These are designed to both enhance and service the interest of previously established consumers (adding prestige and cachet to the label) and, arguably more importantly, to attract the interest of Internet surfers who have accessed their sites through links from other web sites. One independent company which has attempted to exploit web sites in this manner has been Nettwerk. Founded in 1986, the Vancouver-based company (which also has branch offices in Brussels and New York) has an annual turnover of US$1.8 million. Since establishing their web site6 in November 1993, the company have come to perceive it as a key element in their marketing strategy and the maintenance of their corporate identity as a distinctly contemporary operation7. Nettwerk's use of the Internet reflects its co-founder Terry McBride's perception of the disadvantages minor labels are under. As he argued in an interview in the web magazine HotWired:
A lot of the music we release is sometimes very difficult to find. As such, the Net acts as one way for people to have access to our records. The Web is a very level playing field... We can't buy [retail] shelf space the way the majors can, but we can on the Web. It brings it back to how good you are at what you're doing and not how big you are. It's how creative you are on your site .8
Aside from the potential for new and / or fringe industrial players to capitalise on web sites to publicise and expand their operations, there is of course the potential for major labels and artists to begin to compete for attention with competitors by producing web sites which offer more dynamic graphics, increased interactive possibilities, web site-only sounds or visuals, web site specific offers etc. in order to gain market advantage. Such an approach parallels that developed by major companies in the early 1990s, when they pitched artists such as Madonna and Michael Jackson against each other in a battle of big budget, spectacular music video productions, several of which came in at over US $1 million (a factor which was prominently featured in publicity). Indeed Jackson's label Sony has made the first move in this regard, using the Internet as part of an integrated, multi-media, multi-national strategy to both promote Jackson's CD retrospective HIStory: Past, Present and Future (1995) and to re-promote the star's image after two year's of largely negative publicity9. Part of Sony's strategy has been to design, produce and, importantly, publicise the HIStory web site10 as the 'biggest, best' etc. music-related site produced to date.
Produced and designed by the American company Generator Digital Post, the site — entitled 'The Museum of HIStory' and officially 'opened' on the symbolic date of July 4th — lives up to its hype with a standard and variety of graphics unmatched by any prior music related web site (or indeed any other web site this writer has visited). It also has a number of other novel design aspects. One of the most immediate The first of these is its design as 'virtual' museum, navigable by floor plans, rather than the standard interactive brochure 'architecture' favoured by previous music site producers. The second is its archival structure, comprising seven separate 'floors' for its component sections: Jackson's four previous solo albums; HIStory (two floors); and a 'community centre' with links to charity organisations available via the Internet. The third is the staggering of access to the floors, areas of the web site being opened gradually over a three month period, encouraging multiple visits to the site by Internet users and exciting anticipation of the audio-visual experiences to be delivered.
The first stage, which opened on July 4th (despite a number of its areas being incomplete) included:
As should be apparent from this list, the complexity of the site and variety of material available there (even at stage one) mitigates against the site serving as a mere quick-stop for net surfers. Indeed, quick browsing is near impossible given the time required to download files of over 2000K. The museum comparison reflects the extent to which it is necessary to visit the site and actively explore its environs rather than glimpse it in passing as an Internet user follows a series of link chains.
The Jackson initiative aside, large scale industrial contests on this terrain — with their associated ratcheting of production values and costs — have yet to take hold in the industry and will undoubtedly depend on the perceived success of the HIStory web site as a promotional vehicle. One industrial area in which the success of web sites has already been established however is that of web based retail mail-order sites. These are commercial operations which users can visit to browse through currently available CD releases and then order, paying by credit card. A recent survey indicates that this area of the American music retail business is currently earning more than US$ 1 billion per annum, with major Internet 'stores', such as CDNow!, stocking over 140,000 discs11.
As an enterprising extension of already existing mail-order operations, of a kind particularly well established in the USA, these have, as yet, attracted little (international) attention. However, the very inter-national nature of the Internet has allowed operations which were regional and/or national in their advertising and operation, to become international mail-order outlets. The implications of this internationalisation are significant for retail businesses in countries outside of the USA, in that currency exchange rates, local market pricing structures and associated factors mean that prices of the same CD product vary considerably from country to country. Put simply, the retail price of Michael Jackson's HIStory CD set is lower, for example, in the USA than it is Australia. Indeed, it is so appreciably lower that even if post and packaging costs are added, the Australian purchaser will still pay less if s/he mail orders it from the USA rather than purchases it from an Australian retail outlet12. Before Internet 'store-fronts', this mail-order import practice was marginal. Since the introduction of such services however, it has begun to grow. In August 1995, Phil Tripp, co-ordinator of the Australian National Entertainment Industry Conference, described the implication of overseas Internet mail order for Australian music retailing as 'staggering'13. Senior vice president of BMG Australia, Chris Gilbey has gone further and argued that, 'like rust', it 'will continue to erode our business'14 driving retail prices down and damaging local business profitability.
Aside from the potential efficacy of web sites as promotional locations; and / or virtual points of sale, the issue of the Internet's potential as a distribution medium is perhaps the most important one for the industry as the decade advances.
Given the development of Real Audio (discussed in Section II below) it is likely that the Internet will come to offer a viable alternative to the distribution of music in material formats (ie CDs, cassettes, vinyl etc.). In this manner, it will be possible for the music industry to begin to move to a virtual delivery system, charging consumers for the downloading of product from either virtual retail outlets or directly from the music companies themselves (the latter being a more likely option since the retail business has traditionally been premised on the sale of material artefacts). There are obviously problems here, in that piracy, bootlegging and a digital version of (unlicensed) 'home taping' will undoubtedly persist and mutate in the new environment. If these issues can be successfully negotiated and/or minimised, the music industry's move into the Internet could be seen, in the manner of Late Capitalism as a whole, as representing its move towards a more efficient, aggressive and truly multi-national operation. While consideration of this scenario might give industry investors and executives a warm glow, it is one which is an anathema to those who are looking to the Internet for very different reasons.
A number of artists who have a creative, financial or political aversion to dealing with the music industry — and/or who simply cannot attract music industry interest — have seen the Internet, with its facility for 'free' (immaterial) distribution, as a direct, uncompromised alternative to dealing with major music industry companies. Such a position is an 'extreme' one, in music industry terms, since the very free-to-place facility which makes the Internet appear so attractive, (currently) mitigates against musicians earning from music distributed on it. So far, this has posed a deterrent to commercial operations using the medium for anything more than promotional purposes. The Internet has attracted the attention of a number of musicians undeterred by this aspect however. For this loose group, the Internet's industrial under-development is seen as an asset.
Once the Internet is a reality, the music business is finished. There won't be any need for record companies. If I can send you my music direct, what's the point of having a music business?18
While Prince's perceptions here are obviously highly personal and specific to his position as an established (and affluent) artist, it does point to the possibility of the Internet offering artists such as 'Prince' a specialist adjunct to the established music industry flow control and marketing of musical product; one which allows artists to 'release' material on Internet which is not otherwise available on material formats and / or is not of the 'quality' or style which the major wishes to market.
It should of course soon become standard practice for record companies to attempt to enforce watertight contracts with all but the most powerful of stars, to ensure that artists do not have an option (by oversight or otherwise) of distributing their material (currently) free of charge on the Internet. But for prolific artists, the potential for such a readily available distribution channel obviously has highly attractive elements.
The Internet has also been welcomed by those artists, entrepreneurs, critics and fans who embrace what has come to be known as the 'indie' (ie independent) aesthetic and perceive the mainstream commercial companies to be enemies of creativity, autonomy and 'authentic' musical expression. Some of the most powerful and sustained statements of such views were presented in the June 1994 issue of the Californian monthly magazine MAXIMUMROCKNROLL. Over a stark black and white cover image of a young white male with a revolver shoved in his mouth, the banner cover motto proclaimed 'Major Labels — some of your friends are already this fucked'. The editorial, written by Tim Yohannan, compares the activities of major labels to those of the 'nazi skinheads' who, it alleges, conducted a methodical assault on San Francisco's alternative music culture in the early 1990s; and argues that:
...the punk/indie/underground rock scene is under attack, just as it was back then. No difference, except this time the thugs are smarter and richer. Their motive is just about the same — control, power, dominance. Although the former assault was spurred by extreme right wing political rhetoric, the latter is based on more traditional corporate right wing objectives.19
In the face of this assault, Yohannon characterised the most important features of 'true' alternativity to be a purity of 'motivation'; a complete separation from 'governmental and corporate sponsorship, collusions and connections' and 'an ongoing class consciousness to one's communication and expression'20.
More strategically than politically, an (anonymous) writer in the Sydney weekly 3D World suggested the Internet as the solution to neglected artists, offering them one way of bypassing the majors (and their indifference), in the following terms:
Your band has some truly great music but how do you get it out there ? Pressing your own CD amounts to more scratch than you can gather, the record companies won't return your calls, and the radio stations just regurgitate the same hits in a monotonous cycle that wears you out. Suddenly it looks as though you can count your options on the fingers of an unsuccessful Iranian shoplifter.
The sprawling electronic ants-nest of the internet is now providing an answer. The reach, accessibility and low cost of the 'Net provides that much craved exposure. On the 'Net, there is a potential international audience approaching 30 million people, a figure that's multiplying like bathroom mould... These 'Net sites are watched by record companies, music press, teched-up DJs and potential fans.21
The views of Yohannon and the anonymous 3D World writer are shared, to various extents and intensities, by various — often inter-connected — popular music companies and sub-cultures in the West. For many advocates of such philosophies, if not many 'indie' label owners (who are after all, commercial operators), the Internet has assumed the status of a digital promised land where all inequities and oppressions can be resolved and where minor, independent artists can potentially access a huge audience.
Guy Blackman, a twenty year old freelance journalist writing in the weekend 'Review' section of The Australian newspaper, provided a concise statement of this position, arguing that:
For those bands and musicians in Australia for whom music is a passion rather than a profession, for those people who continue to make music on the outskirts of an industry determined to look backwards rather than forward, the Internet is one of the only truly level playing fields available. It is on this turf that marginalised musicians with real insight and originality can take on the tired old major league players, and have a chance of beating them at their own game.22
Much of this rhetoric around providing music free to a public usually identified in terms of a community of fans rather than simply consumers — an important distinction — recalls and combines a number of quasi-anarchic, anti-commercial sentiments and initiatives prominent during both the hippy era, the punk new wave and the continuing vogue and fetishisation of 'indie' — ie independent label music. Along with the hyperbole over virtual reality, what might be termed contemporary 'counter-cultural' discussions of the Internet have often been characterised by an emergent, millennial utopianism. In this scenario, the Internet is posed a post-capitalist wilderness where colonists are promised the opportunity of forming virtual locations, virtual communities and free associations untrammelled by the exploitative tentacles of advanced capitalism. Of course this is fantasy, a scenario of extreme exaggeration. But there is opportunity and hope for those dedicated to styles and strategies of music production which proceed with greater autonomy from the multi-national, multi-media networks of the major music industry agencies.
Contrary to the libertarian, anarchistic emphasis referred to above however, some of the more creative engagements with the Internet as an access-distribution system to have emerged to date have been those which operate within the legal boundaries of music industry practice. In particular, a number of new services, which are currently being described as 'Internet Radio', have recently been established. These have received a major boost with the development of 'Real Audio' software by the Seattle based company Progressive Networks. Real Audio constitutes a major advance in sound delivery on Internet in that users do not have to wait for entire files to be downloaded before sound playback begins, with sound playing immediately and continuously. (At time of writing [ie August 1995], Real Audio is also becoming the latest 'hot' feature on new music web sites. Yothu Yindi's new site23, for instance, is being promoted with the slogan 'Don't wait for a download! ...Killer compression by RealAudio'.)
The advent and advantages of Real Audio have enabled Internet operations such as the New York based Sonic Net24 and Californian Radio HK25 to begin operating as viable services. Sonic Net is notable for including musical pieces which, as stated on their web site, have been 'composed, performed and recorded solely for real-time broadcast on the Web using real audio' (and are not available elsewhere26). Radio HK declares itself 'The first station to broadcast exclusively into the Internet, Real Time Non-Stop' and is also notable for the legality of its broadcasting of (American) musical material on the Internet. As a result of a pioneering agreement with ASCAP (the American Society of Performers, Authors and Publishers) and their department of New Media and Technology Strategy, Radio HK have a trial licensing agreement which represents a major step towards the legitimation of music transmissions on the Internet. Despite such advances, the opportunities for creative uses of the Internet lie not just in distribution (and / or transmission) per se — important as these are — but also in more imaginative and interactive engagements with the medium.
Issues of the commercial viability and wisdom of frequent releases play little part in the consciousness of many independent artists working in the techno medium since many of the musicians involved pursue (some semblance of) an 'alternative' life style and have non-traditional 'career' aspirations. The Internet's flexibility and current operation outside the profit-intensive sphere of the music industry makes the medium particularly attractive to such individuals since it is possible for them to produce, disseminate and receive music via the Internet without having the need to link up with recording companies, the live performance circuit or clubs, raves etc. This factor has produced a domestic production culture which has been little documented and whose participants show little interest in documentation or publicity beyond the confines of their Internet networks. The sector has however been acknowledged by more mainstream techno producers. In December 1994, for instance, the UK duo Orbital (who received major acclaim earlier in that year for their Snivilization CD) put music samples onto an Internet site which they invited fans to download, remix and rework and return to the duo for possible inclusion on future Orbital releases. A number of these returned pieces appeared on subsequent Orbital CDs.
One of the principal problems affecting music on the Internet at the moment is the quality of the sound which can be carried and the high volume of information which has to be downloaded to re-constitute the sound to Internet users. In this sense the ideal music distribution service imagined by Prince as being on the Internet has not yet arrived. In recognition of this, a number of techno artists have explored the potential of using digital ISDN phone lines to deliver material as a relayed live performance. One of the pioneering acts in this regard was the UK ensemble The Future Sound of London (henceforth referred to as FSOL), best known for their single Papua New Guinea (1992). In 1994 they began to improvise and 'broadcast' tracks to radio stations, bypassing the normal routes of either record release or live appearance. Their example was followed by Orbital in April 1995 when they delivered a short set live to air on the UK station BBC Radio 1.
A selection of the material produced by FSOL for phone broadcast was edited down into a seventy four minute long CD, entitled I.S.D.N., which was released for one week only on 5/12/94 after which it was deleted29. An advert for the CD published in the UK music press in December 1994 included prominent copy stressing that the ISDN facility had allowed the band to 'enter a new period' and ended with the (capitalised) speculation that through such media 'ELECTRONIC ARTISTS WILL NEVER PLAY ROCK VENUES AGAIN'. Intended to be provocative, the slogan points to the often uncomfortable contrast between the music production 'performance' of a techno act at a dance party or concert and the performance traditions of rock. Of all the popular techno artists of the 1990s it is perhaps only the US performer Moby, and the British act The Prodigy, who have managed to perform in a dynamic manner akin to traditional rock acts. Few other techno artists seem inclined to follow his example however and the performance traditions of the two genres remain distinct and largely incompatible.
With regard to areas of new practice, perhaps the most two most significant developments are those of multiple-user, music generating interfaces and techno chains. One of the most notable pioneers of interactive musical sites and services on the Internet is Canton Becker, a young, American post-graduate student at Northwestern University (NWU), who has established several web sites dedicated to providing access to his various interactive projects. Becker, a student of Amnon Wolman, co-ordinator of the composition program at NWU30, developed an algorithmic techno-music composing program in 1994 which enabled Internet users to access, modify and play back music31. Named 'The Communal Groove Machine' (CGM) by its author, the program is located within a MOO (a multi-user, interactive, virtual environment) named CTDMOO32. This site allows users to interact and collectively produce new music by manipulating the pre-constituted facilities of the three rooms present within the MOO. These contain libraries of rhythm sequences, chord progressions etc which can be looped and combined and facilities for creating new rhythm scores33. Given that musical interaction and production takes place in this discrete environment, there has been little publicity for the project in the music media. Indeed, it is largely through the CGM's exterior manifestation at the three day performance event 'Amnon Wolman's Andy Warhol Diaries' held in the Dome Room, Chicago in June 1994, that the project is known outside of its user-group.
The 'Warhol Diaries' was a semi-improvised, audio-visual performance, loosely based around Warhol's posthumously published diaries, which took place over a ten hour period. Its soundtrack comprised music produced by users who had logged on to the CTDMOO and activated its compositional facilities in the months preceding the performance. Using a program written by Matthew Moller; Becker, Moller and Wolman mixed the CTDMOO's MIDI files and recorded them onto digital audio tape. This tape was then played back at the event with live vocalists and a visual co-ordinator complementing the pre-recorded material with their own performances.
Following the 'Warhol Diaries' event, Becker and Moller developed a subsequent system called the Distributed Real-Time Groove Network (DRGN). The first part of the DRGN became operable in March 1995. This is described by its users as comprising 'jamming rooms with virtual instruments'34, whereby geographically dispersed users can jam on virtual versions of standard instruments (bass, guitar, drums etc). At present Becker and Moller are working on schemes to disseminate and market the material produced by DRGN users by either a 'radio' service on the Internet 'broadcasting' the music produced within the MOO and/or CD or CD-Rom releases of the material. Whether these proposals are economically feasible or not, the approach offers a new perspective on (physically) displaced musical collaboration.
The techno chain is a practice which has an even more autonomist aspect than the centrally co-ordinated CGM MOO site. It involves techno music producers using audio samples lodged at web sites to produce music on their own computers, 'transmitting' these on the Internet to specific sites, having these pieces downloaded by other users — who modify the data they have received, and subsequently re-transmit and/or lodge these for other future users. These techno 'chains', elusive and ephemeral like some dimly perceived cultural sub-atomic activity, operate outside all the established channels and networks of the music industry and rarely — if ever — materialise outside the Internet. Their traces can be seen at sample sites and by the inquiries of users on news groups like <alt.binaries.sounds.music> chasing samples, sites and contacts. Whether these chain networks develop as a significant cultural activity for more than a minority 'fringe' remains open to question. But it is in these activities that a new, autonomous and radically different kind of musical practice becomes constituted via the Internet and offers us a scenario beyond the mere commercial colonisation of cyberspace by late 20th Century capitalism.
While rock bands and the rock performance tradition have often been antithetical to contemporary musicians working with computer technologies, the production of computer graphics has been a much closer medium and practice. From the mid-1980s on a number of musicians collaborated with media artists on joint projects (such as M/A/R/R/S who worked with scratch video maker Rik Lander on the Pump Up the Volume video; or Ryuichi Sakamoto, who collaborated with Paul Garrin on the Rainsong video [1986]). During this period a number of dedicated audio-visual acts also developed, most notably Australia's Severed Heads35 and the British outfit Stakker36.
The increasingly low cost and technical integration of sound and image production and manipulation has implications for a broader music related sector. As leading Australian music video maker Maurice Todman has argued:
For producers like us, I guess the question is where the music industry is going to fit in with the new electronic media. If it affects the size of the record companies markets it's going to hit us, and times are tight as it is. I mean we'll look for the opportunities — and we are — but it's threatening. You still need images and image producers for CD-Roms and computers of course but what the budgets and budgetary constraints will be is anyone's guess. With people being able to produce sounds and images in their bedrooms companies like ours [ie Perpetual Motion] look like being squeezed unless we can go with the new medium (and we are working on just that).37
Todman's comments appear to be born out by the diversification of acts such as FSOL into video production, producing acclaimed computer graphic videos for their Lifeforms CD in 1994 and going on to produce a thirty minute pilot program — entitled Teachings From The Electronic Brain — which was premiered on MTV Europe and at Glastonbury festival in 1995. As FSOL member Gary Cobain emphasised in an interview on the TV project, 'It's a myth that video needs to be expensive... By the time you bring everything in house you become free creatively to do what you want to do'38.
The possibility of creating audio-visual web sites has also provided a fresh impetus for this kind of integrated activity, and the mid 1990s are beginning to see the emergence of acts who have specifically come together to use the Internet — rather than moving into it as a outgrowth of purely musical activity. One of the most significant of this emergent sector of Internet orientated audio-visual producers was the UK outfit The Black Dog, who broke up in mid-1995. The Black Dog were formed by computer and music enthusiast Ken Downie after placing an ad in a music technology magazine, through which he met the two other members of the outfit. As he explained in an article in the UK weekly NME (entitled 'Dogs in Cyberspace'), 'I just knew that computers and music would be very big. I saw the Internet thing and merged the lot. It had to be done I guess'39. Until their demise in April 1995, the outfit released music in conventional CD format (ie their releases Bytes and Temple of Transparent Balls [both 1994] and Spanners [1995]) and operated a web site which included various information pages and interactive graphics, none of which served any kind of overt promotional function for the music releases but rather operated as an autonomous area of the ensemble's work.
One of the projects which has most pointedly identified the nature of the (audio-visual) digital medium as a 'realm', in its own right, has been that of The Shaolin Wooden Men (henceforth SWM). The SWM are a virtual group 'enabled and facilitated' by the Melbourne-based team of computer-performance artist Troy Innocent and techno musician/producer Ollie Olsen. Drawing on Innocent's history as a founder member of the techno-anarchist, multi-media performance duo Cyberdada, and Olsen's experience with the audio-visual act Third Eye and music projects such as Max Q40; Innocent and Olsen have 'facilitated' a project which attempts to imagine, represent and pre-figure a set of artificial creative intelligences, self-replicating and self-developing in a digital sphere of techno music and computer graphics.
Echoing the (lower tech) pranksterism of The Time Lords41, who for their single Doctorin' The Tardis (1988), maintained the fiction that the music was produced by an American police car (which starred in the music video and was consequently 'interviewed' on TV pop shows); Innocent and Olsen maintain that the SWM have their own existence and speak for themselves. In an e-mail manifesto, sent to the author in July 1995, the SWM declared:
In our current forms we are 20% IMAGE, 10% CODE, and 70% DIGITAL SOUND. Our bodies are made of SOUND, we act as containers for that sound just as audio CDs and other recorded mechanisms contain sound. However, we do not just replay recorded sounds, we use ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS to process and reorder sound so that interaction with us results in a new configuration of sound on each instance.42
Bruce Butler, the head of the SWM's record label Psy Harmonics, has supported their characterisation by describing the SWM as 'binary code, floating around the Internet'43. This emphasis on the SWM's binarity — their existence as strings of binary code which produces audio-musical and visual patterns — suggests, however fancifully, a further development of the synaesthesia of sound and image pursued by the likes of Garren or Stakker. The 'band', have so far released two (traditional) audio CDs (an eponymous debut [1994] and The Hungry Forest [1995]) on the Psy Harmonics label44, but the promise of Innocent's characterisation has been more fully accomplished in the act's debut CD-Rom, due for release in early 1996. This, as yet untitled work, features computer graphic images of the SWM (represented as vaguely humanoid creatures) 'performing' the featured music tracks. The audio and visual levels are programmed so as to interact with each other — adjusting the images and positions of the 'band' alters the music, reinforcing the notion that the 'band' are 'made of sound'. Their web site is also due to open in late 1995, with the SWM emphasising their determination to 'breed and proliferate there'45.
Although the SWM are a fiction, a fanciful creation of a computer artist and musician releasing (material) audio-product through a small-scale, local, independent record company, their imagination is significant in its suggestion of a sphere of music (and audio-visual) production constituted within new media rather than simply re-located to it. The development of music services and practices on the Internet are likely to be as varied and unpredictable as the range of other services on the Internet. As of yet we can only imagine the new forms and genres might come to be constituted within the medium. As a believer in the virtues of cultural diversity and experimentation however, I would hope that in decades to come, the range of 'alternative' creative engagements with the Internet outlined in this article might be seen as the early manifestation of a new kind of musical and broader, cultural avant garde — one premised on serial creativity and modification. The development of any such avant garde would have one significant advantage over its 20th Century predecessors: its inscription within the rhizomatic space of the Internet, rather than the specific, elite and exclusivist locations of its forebears. This in turn would allow it to operate laterally and simultaneously, rather than being managed by the gate-keepers of commerce and official culture alike. While such a scenario might appear Utopian, we can but hope.
Thanks to Chris Chesher, Andrew Murphie, members of the Sydney IASPM seminar, Steve Jones and the IASPM e-mail network for their assistance on research for this paper.
1 P. Hayward and G. Orrock 'Window of Opportunity: CD-ROMS, The International Music Industry and Early Australian
Initiatives,' Convergence, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 62-79.
2 Personal communication with the editors of Convergence, July
1995.
3 At http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~bryan/roxy/
4 At http://www.hyperreal.com/music/artists/brian_eno/
5 The notion of commercial 'independence' is explored more
fully in the following section 'Exploiting the Internet'.
7 A perception also enhanced by the label's production and
promotion of music CDs for their artists with added CD-ROM tracks,
a format termed 'CD+MM' by the label (such as Mystery Machine's 10
Speed CD) from 1994 on — a tactic not pursued by major labels such
as Sony and Warners until 1995.
8 Cited in J. Glave,'Nettwerk', HotWired, July 1995.
9 This strategy,responding to the highly negative publicity
concerning Jackson and accusations of child molestation which
preoccupied the media in 1993-94, directly recalls Madonna's move
into big-budget spectacular music videos following her own career
'low' in the late 1980s due to the box-office flop of her
star-vehicle film Shanghai Surprise (1988) and her much publicised
marital problems with actor Sean Penn.
10 At http://www.sony.com/Music/MichaelJackson.
11 Cited in J. Casimir, 'CDs cheaper, easier to buy on Net:
survey', Sydney Morning Herald, 28. July 1995, p. 3.
12 Particularly if the orderer orders several CDs at once,
lowering unit post and packing costs, and keeps the value of their
order under A$200, the value per parcel at which Australian
customs duties begin to apply.
13 Cited in Casimir, op cit.
14 Ibid.
17 In this, Michael has refused to record and release new
material alleging the company's mishandling of his career. This
resulted in a high-profile, and highly costly, legal action
against Sony by Michael — viewed by many in the industry as a
'test-case' — which he lost.
18 'Prince' cited in A. Richardson, 'My name isn't Prince and
I am Flunky', New Musical Express, 11 March 1995, p. 37.
19 T. Yohannon untitled, unpaginated editorial,
MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, 133, June 1994.
20 Ibid.
21 (Anonymous) 'e-music', 3D World, 12 June 1995, p. 47.
22 G. Blackman, 'Old Rockers lack Networth', Weekend
Australian Review, 20-21, May 1995, p. 12.
23 At http://www.yothuyindi.com
25 At http://www.hkweb.com/radio/menu.html
26 Although Sonic Net's web site also includes the message
'Note to record companies call us if you are interested in the CD
rights'.
27 Unattributed, µ-Ziq for the Massive', New Musical Express,
8 April 1995, p. 4.
28 Mike Paradinas cited in the above.
29 A shortened EP version being 're-released' in mid-1995.
30 Who, along with being active as a New Music composer, also
conducted John Cage's Europa V at the 1993 Cage NOW Festival.
31 A taster for the program is available at the Communal
Groove Machine site at http://ctdnet.acns.nwu.edu/cmbecker/techno/techno.html
32 Accessible via the CGM site (address above).
33 For further information on the music production facilities,
see A. Wolman and C. Becker, 'The Communal Groove Machine', paper
presented to the International Computer Music Conference in Arhus,
Denmark, September 1994 — a copy of which is located at
http://ctdnet.acns.nwu.edu/cmbecker/techno/paper.html
34 Description on DRGN web page at
http://ctd.net.acns.nwu.edu/hugo/drgn.html
35 See R. Harley, 'Acts of Volition', Perfect Beat, 2, no. 3
(July 1995), for further discussion of Severed Heads and their
career.
36 See P. Hayward, 'Industrial Light and Magic' in: P. Hayward
(ed), Culture, Technology & Creativity, (London: John Libbey,
1992) pp.137-38 for an analysis of Stakker's Eurotech video and
the development of styles of music video using advanced visual
effects.
37 Discussion with the author, 9 May 1995, Sydney.
38 C. Cobain cited in (unattributed), 'Cathode rave for FSOL',
New Musical Express, 6 May 1995, p. 3.
39 R. Howe, 'Dogs in Cyberspace', New Musical Express, 2 April
1995, p. 11.
40 For a discussion of Max Q's Monday Night By Satellite music
video (1989), and its representation of virtual reality see P.
Hayward, 'Situating Cyberspace' in Future Visions, eds. P. Hayward
and T. Wollen (London: BFI, 1993), pp.190-91.
41 A one-off project by Jim Cauty and Bill Drummond — the duo
best known for their work as the JAMMs (aka the Justified Ancients
of Mu Mu) and the KLF.
42 Sent to the author on 13 July 1995.
43 Cited in R. Guillaitt, 'Kings of Virtual Music', Sydney
Morning Herald, 13 June 1995, p. 37.
44 Samples of tracks from these two CDs are available at the
Psy Harmonics web site at
http://www.peg.apc.org/~psy/
45 SWM e-mail sent to the author on 13 July 1995.