THERE'S NEW 'BAND WIDTH' ON THE WEB

By: Wayne Robins Newspaper Sites Showcase Local Bands





The band called Haggis has been No. 1 for enough weeks to be considered a rock 'n' roll phenomenon. Yet they're nowhere to be found on the Billboard Top 200 album charts, and their CDs would be difficult to find in a national search of Tower Records stores.



But Haggis rules just the same - on the local bands' MP3 download chart at azcentral.com, the Web affiliate of The Arizona Republic. Located in the site's entertainment section (with the streetwise name, The Rep), the message is clear: This isn't your grandmother's Arizona Republic.



And the Republic is not alone in establishing a new "rep" for itself with music. Between Albuquerque and Boston, from St. Paul to Providence, daily newspapers have been using their sites to promote local musicians with various features, such as downloads and directories.



"We wanted to keep everything that was great about a newspaper, but add to it," says Mike Coleman, a marketing and promotion manager for azcentral.com and The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. There are now more than 100 artists on the azcentral.com site, in more than a dozen categories including alternative, blues, classical, country, funk, jazz, rap, rock, techno, and world. "We have one staff member who spends about 10 hours a week contacting local bands, encouraging them to get on the site," Coleman reports.



Though the conventional wisdom seems to be that online music is one way to bring younger readers to the newspaper, or at least the newspaper's Web site, anecdotal experience argues that participants aren't just kids. "It's reached the housewives and Mr. Moms, due to the print edition cross-promoting the Web site, and vice versa," says Haggis' bass player, a young man known only as Moon. "That - and with the Napster fiasco - everyone knows about MP3 files."



A local spin



The Boston Globe's Boston.com may have achieved the most critical mass of music among dailies. Having started offering MP3 downloads a year and a half ago, it has something like 700 local musicians accessible on the site. (MP3 is a file format for sound, as JPEG is a file format for photos.) One goal was to make "everything" about Boston.com local, says Stephanie Shore, marketing director for Boston.com.



A short drive from Boston on Interstate 95, The Providence Journal's projo.com also puts an emphatic local spin on the Rhode Island music scene. Go to http://www.projo.com/music and you'll find features such as "Local Band of the Day," an index of local bands, a local music bulletin board, and even an electronic mail petition campaign to convince Rhode Island club owners to book bands to perform live music in the early evenings as a service to fans and musicians who have to get up and go to day jobs in the morning.



Projo.com's music site has a mission statement that's unusually compelling coming from a mainstream newspaper company: "To Spread the Music. Because We Can."



"The words are technologically true," says Sheila Lennon, features and interactive producer for projo.com. "An encoded audio file is just information. The MP3 format compresses big audio files enough to transfer them speedily at today's bandwidths." But Lennon admits there's a good deal of pride behind the slogan as well. "We can spread the music because we're the Journal, we have resources, we'll even rip [or create audio files for] your CD for you, if you don't know how."



There are good reasons for The Providence Journal and its Web site to marry music and technology. The Journal is a Belo newspaper, and therefore has a heavy investment in Digital:Convergence's :CueCat technology. "The impending Digital:Convergence launch has editors thinking in terms of value-added, Web-only multimedia features to accompany stories, and the music site has already broken that ground," Lennon explains.



In addition, she says, there is a constant flow of shared content between the Journal's print edition and projo.com. "The print side offers fresh local content," Lennon says, pointing to weekly "Band Spotlight" and "Classical Spotlight" columns; club listings; and news stories and reviews.



One striking aspect about these local band initiatives is the role reversal between the artists and the media outlets. Before the Internet, local musical artists without major label contracts would move mountains to wheedle and cajole the most parsimonious mention in newspaper entertainment sections. The mountains are now coming to them.



"We started with marketing initiatives," says Shore of Boston.com. "We gave out postcards soliciting music at local shows, advertisements in local music magazines, as well as with mentions in the Friday Boston Globe music section."



It was much the same story in Providence, beginning with "an advertising push in print and on radio," Lennon of projo.com says. "Little boxes in the newspaper offered musicians a place to promote their music. The marketing folks ran a booth with live demos of the site (with local bands playing out of the PC speakers) at the Gravity Games here in July, and at the Rhode Island Monthly block party in August," but it's largely been promoted via mentions in the weekend entertainment section of the paper.



Hits at first site



While these sites have succeeded at generating buzz, azcentral.com seems to have galvanized its regional music community in a relatively short time. "It took quite a bit of work," says Coleman of azcentral.com. The band site launched last summer with 40 Arizona artists. "We've received about 6,000 page views per week in the MP3 area of our site, which is not earth-shattering, but we're pretty happy with it, since that area of the site has only been around since July, and the numbers are steadily increasing each month."



Marketing-savvy musicians, such as those in Haggis, saw the potential immediately. "The folks at azcentral contacted us, told us of their vision, and we immediately jumped at the chance to be a part of it from the inception," says bass player Moon. "It's great to have something like this going and growing in one's own back yard."



Haggis appears to be azcentral.com's biggest hit. The site maintains a weekly top 10 list of most popular downloads, and Haggis has led the pack for three months. It's got a lock on first and second place with "Turpentine" (6,417 downloads at last count) and "Humming" (5,468). Not too far behind in third and fourth place is Idle Bind (5,331 downloads of "She Said" and 4,345 of "Sundays"). Truckers on Speed, with tracks in seventh and eighth place, seems stuck in Haggis/Idle Bind gridlock.



"Due to our exposure on azcentral.com, we receive a lot more calls for potential gigs, lots of people wanting more information on what Haggis is all about, A&R people from record labels, management companies, magazines," Moon says. "We sell out of our 'Got Haggis?' merchandise on eBay all the time to people all over the United States." And, he adds, "This is just the tip of the iceberg, when you figure into the equation that this site has been around for only three months and continues to evolve and open more and more doors for everyone that has taken the time to get involved with it."



Well, maybe not everyone. Which is why each of these sites spells out in some detail what these audio files are, and makes clear the obligations of both musicians and listeners. "Every MP3 file on MP3@Boston.com has been placed here by the song's performer or representative," the site's information section states.



"MP3s are not illegal," as Boston.com puts it. "Cars are not illegal, but stealing a car that doesn't belong to you and then trying to sell it is. It's the same with MP3s." All the newspaper Web sites (as well as purely musical sites such as MP3.com) allow the user to download a song to his or her computer. But you can't (or shouldn't) "burn" it to your own compact disc, and you can't (or shouldn't) distribute it using peer-to-peer file-sharing technology such as Napster.



While the sites affiliated with the Globe, Journal, and Republic have dived into local music headfirst, others are testing the waters more cautiously. The St. Paul Pioneer Press' site, PioneerPlanet, has a list of Minnesota musician links that may connect you to artists' recordings at MP3.com or may contain just a bio, photo, or upcoming concert dates.



The Albuquerque Journal Web site on its page at http://www.abqjournal.com/venue/bands.htm similarly lists bands alphabetically and provides capsule descriptions of their musical styles and members. And The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., has links to 30 area musicians and their songs that can be heard on MP3.com. The strategy for The Courier-Journal's site is for the musicians to submit their songs to MP3.com, then tell the paper's Web site so they can be added to the list.



Pay to play to stay?



The question for newspapers and their Web sites, of course, must be: Is rock 'n' roll here to pay?



The possibilities are intriguing. Azcentral.com is among the sites that have affiliations with MyPlay.com. Someone who downloads a track off of azcentral.com can opt to sign up for a MyPlay private store "locker" (thus using up less space on their hard drive).



"Every time someone signs up, azcentral.com earns around $1.50 from MyPlay," Coleman says. "We haven't made a ton of money off of this yet, but it's a small way to monetize our efforts, beyond traditional banner ads."



Azcentral.com is also looking into extending the multimedia reach of its music section. "We've got a three-person multimedia crew, and we're getting ready to start sending them out to some local shows to shoot video of some of the bands that are on the site, which we'll post alongside their tracks," Coleman says. "We also think there's potential to someday work with some of our top artists in ways that will benefit both of us financially, such as allowing consumers to order custom-burned CDs featuring one or more local acts," Coleman says.



But that's all down the road apiece. Right now, it seems revolutionary enough that in addition to providing readers with truth, justice, the comics, and classified ads, a newspaper with its Web site can Spread the Music. Because They Can.



Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com), an associate editor for E&P, was a longtime rock critic for Newsday, as well as Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy magazines.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.