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ESSENTIAL
SURFING
www.acousticguitar.com
Acoustic Guitar magazine's home page features excerpts, lessons,
forums, and giveaways.
www.allmusic.com
The All Music Guide is a comprehensive look at artists, styles,
and recordings.
www.frets.com
Luthier Frank Ford's informative and entertaining Web site spotlights
guitar repair.
www.guitarsite.com
Guitarsite
has extensive links, lessons, and tablature.
www.harmony-central.com
Harmony Central is a music news site with an extensive song and
lyrics database links.
www.live365.com
Live365
presents Web radio broadcasts from around the globe.
www.mimf.com
The
Musical Instrument Makers Forum features news, supplies, and instruction
for acoustic luthiers.
www.mp3.com
This
mammoth collection of digital music files and artist info set the
trend for downloads.
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In the tidal wave of technological invention of the past ten years,
nothing had more impact on how musical information is shared, how
musicians and luthiers promote their work, and how music itself
is disseminated than the rise of the Internet and the World Wide
Web. With roots in '60s-era cold war paranoia, the Internet was
conceived as a way for the military to maintain communications following
a nuclear war, and it grew from an initial network of four academic
machines to a global network comprising tens of millions of computers.
In a swords-to-plowshares evolution, the Internet shed its vestigial
military ties in 1990 and became a completely public—and increasingly
commercial—enterprise.
Throughout the '90s, email remained the undisputed champ of Internet
applications. Early Internet developers were amazed to discover
that their brainchild was used far less for remote computing than
for joke dissemination and recipe swapping. Email soon outstripped
all other traffic, and the rapid rise of commercial Internet service
providers in the early '90s made email practical for tens of millions
around the globe.
Roving blueswoman Kristina Olsen sums up the advantages of the
medium nicely when she writes from the road, "Most of my gigs come
to me via email. All my agents are online, and getting itineraries
and details via email is great because there is none of the confusion
of trying to remember what was said by whom over the phone. I order
CDs via email. When I'm touring overseas it saves expensive phone
calls, and I don't have to call at ridiculous hours when I'm in
a distant time zone. Sheesh, I'm writing you from a ferry in New
Zealand!"
Chris Wade of Adastra Entertainment books acoustic music acts from
dozens of countries on four continents, so keeping tabs on everyone
can be tricky and time consuming. "Email saves us a load of money
on stamps, phone calls, and so forth, and it is a very economical
use of time," she writes from her offices in Yorkshire, England.
With a dedicated computer and some management software, groups
of like-minded enthusiasts can set up a list-serve–style mailing
group, where email is shared with everyone on the list. Members
of guitar-oriented mailing groups find that they often can locate
local jam sessions, music clubs, gigs, and even a guest room when
traveling, courtesy of contacts they've established on the lists.
Usenet groups, which work like electronic bulletin boards, are
another tool connecting the global community. There are scores of
newsgroups dedicated to music, and RMMGA—rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic—is
dedicated to the acoustic guitarist. This virtual guitar community
shares daily news, quips, and comments about guitars, players, and
gear. Last year the members of RMMGA produced a double CD made up
of tracks submitted by players from all over the map, most of whom
knew each other only via the newsgroup.
The Internet might well have remained the province of nerds and
academics if not for the birth of the World Wide Web in the early
'90s. In much the same way that the graphic interface and mouse
revolutionized personal computing, Web software and HTML code set
the stage for the multimedia environment that characterizes the
Internet today. The big leap forward was helped along by navigational
tools that Web software provides. Much of the information now on
the Web was available online prior to 1992, but there was no easy
way to find it, view it, or use it. The Web's real revolutionary
quality is how it allows the user to find any needle in the Internet's
immense haystack of data and move effortlessly from one part of
the haystack to another via hyperlinks. Added to this new mobility
is the ability to combine text with color images, sound, and even
video. Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, was introduced
in 1993, and the ease of a point-and-click entrée into the
rich, colorful world of Web resources made converts of confirmed
Luddites.
Musicians, promoters, purveyors of musical instruments, record
sellers, and music enthusiasts alike were quick to take advantage
of the new medium for promotion and commerce. Olsen depends on the
Web in a variety of ways. "My CDs on my own label are sold via the
Internet," she says, "and I have the same clout on www.amazon.com
as Warner Brothers does! I track radio airplay on the Internet,
and my Web site (www.kristinaolsen.com) has my tour schedule, info
on my recordings, and how to get my CDs and be on my mailing list.
With the Web, I have a fighting chance of getting my music heard
and purchased."
Adastra uses the Web to post artist information, including photos
and sound samples, tour schedules, and contact info. "The Web has
revolutionized how we work," says Wade. "I can't imagine not having
it now."
Existing music media leaped into the Web era feet first, with magazines,
music stores, record companies, and radio stations establishing
Internet domains. Acoustic Guitar's www.acousticguitar.com,
for example, offers excerpts from the magazine's newsstand editions,
online guitar lessons and discussion forums, special Web-only giveaways,
and links to other guitar-oriented sites.
Mickie Zekley of Lark in the Morning World Musical Instruments
was a pioneer when he set up www.larkinam.com. "Being one of the
first music businesses on the Web has greatly increased awareness
of what we do, and it has increased sales," he says. "Besides getting
Internet orders, we have people getting our big catalog, calling
in orders, or coming to one of our stores because they found us
on the Web. Everything ties together." Zekley is quick to insist
that the Web shouldn't just be a source of free advertising. "An
effective Internet business must do more than offer items for sale,"
he says. "It should have added value. We try to make our site informative
by offering articles about different aspects of traditional music
and other hard-to-find information, images, and sounds."
Instrument builders using traditional retail outlets tend to use
the Web for educational purposes rather than direct sales. "The
Internet hasn't changed the way we sell guitars," says C.F. Martin
and Co.'s Dick Boak. "Although we are certainly concerned about
how it affects our dealers, we don't sell directly from our factory,
so the Internet for us is simply an information service for our
customers. We do consider our presence on the Web to be quite important
for marketing, and we are investing in the third iteration of our
evolving site (www.martinguitar.com)."
For smaller builders, the Internet can dramatically expand the
potential market. Robert Abrams of Trillium Octave Mandolins suggests
that the Web is helping him disseminate his work faster than was
possible before. He sells his instruments to clients from all over
the world via his Web site and email. "I get orders from people
I've never met," he says. "The whole deal happens with no human
contact at all."
Abrams' experience of an Internet-only business exchange has become
typical of music sales in the brave new world of e-commerce. Traditional
"bricks and mortar" businesses, including Tower Records and Elderly
Instruments, established parallel Web outlets, but the phenomenal
rise of virtual businesses such as Amazon.com has inspired many
Web-only music retailers including CDnow and EveryCD. Alongside
the big players are a raft of specialty shops featuring instant
access to recordings and instruments from every imaginable musical
tradition.
Throughout the '90s, Web technology evolved synergistically with
the digital revolution in sound recording, and the last few years
have witnessed a development that will revolutionize music distribution
in the new millennium. Once it became commonplace to translate the
strum of a guitar into a bit stream of 1's and 0's, the way was
paved for Internet transmission of acoustic-based sounds. The development
of MP3 and similar data-compression schemes makes it possible to
cheaply and easily disseminate everything from short sound bites
to full-length CDs via any digital medium. It is now possible for
music to go directly from the fretboard to the listener's ear without
the intervening step of tape or disc. Visionary musicians like Todd
Rundgren and Roger McGuinn are gambling on this future and are dedicating
themselves to Web-only recording projects. Sony and BMG followed
suit this spring by making digital downloads from their catalogs
available online for a fee. The way we listen to music is also
changing. Prototype MP3-style music players capable of storing up
to 100 CDs' worth of music on small Walkman-style devices were unveiled
in early April.
The worm in this apple of good fortune for Web-based music businesses
resides in the freewheeling nature of the Web itself and in the
"free-stuff" mentality that pervades Web culture. The very technology
that makes it easy for artists to put their music on the Web also
makes it easy for others to pass it around without a thought for
royalties. A new program called Napster sent chills through the
music industry this spring. This application makes the Internet
an enormous jukebox by letting users swap digital music files among
all Napster-enabled hard drives logged onto the Web. Theoretically,
the program would make it possible for everyone on the Web to download
free copies of a song or CD once it had been uploaded.
There is a notion that the Web will eliminate music business middlemen,
but it is more likely that profits will just shift to a different
sector. In the California gold rush of 1849, blue jeans manufacturers
and mining suppliers got the gold—not the prospectors. In the new
rush toward Web wealth, software developers, computer makers, and
service providers are reaping bigger rewards than musicians. Forbes
ASAP editor Michael S. Malone opined in a recent essay that
the Web craze has peaked and that those dreaming of big fortunes
in e-commerce are in for a rude awakening.
The Web offers acoustic musicians unprecedented opportunities,
but there is an inevitable irony in the fusion of newfangled technology
with instruments and music rooted in the predigital—even pre-industrial—world.
Herschel Freeman books many of the world's best roots artists. He
uses email and maintains an extensive Web site to present his acts
to prospective clients, but he is guarded in his enthusiasm for
the Internet. He sums up his ambivalence when he says, "I'm still
kind of an old-fashioned guy. My business was built on personal
relationships that work more easily with the sound of the human
voice than the availability of electronic info. I hope that never
changes."
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine's
Tenth Anniversary issue, July 2000, No. 91. That issue features
an extensive collection of stories, essays, and articles about the
artists, trends, guitars, gear, and music that defined the 1990s.
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