Nirvana Is a Click Away

You know that feeling you get when you walk into Blockbuster and there are racks and racks of videos but you can’t seem to settle on a single one? Multiply that experience a couple thousand times, and you’ve got a fairly accurate picture of music on the Internet. A lot of musical acts are concerned about how they’ll make money in the Age of the Download. But there’s another question that merits attention–one of particular importance to consumers. With hundreds of thousands of songs floating around the Net, how does the ordinary fan sort out all the junk in order to get to the good stuff?

Off-line, finding music is straightforward: you hear about new bands from friends or critics, see them on Leno or Letterman and buy their CDs from the stacks of new releases that are placed right up front in most record stores. Online, however, the degree of difficulty goes up. There are innumerable independent bands on the Web that aren’t being written up in the mainstream press and aren’t getting played on TV or radio. There aren’t enough hours in the day for a single listener to get a handle on all these microbands. Unless you’ve got rabbit-quick DSL service (most ordinary folks have relatively tortoise-like 56K modems), downloading a song can take half an hour or more. Given that there are many more songs online than there are at your local record store, who has the time–or the bandwidth–to listen to it all?

That’s where talent-scout websites come in. A growing number of sites on the Web specialize in finding unsigned bands. Among the best such sites are Riffage, iCAST and Jimmy and Doug’s Farmclub.com They all feature more than just new music. iCAST, for example, has news stories, chat rooms and other services. Most important, however, they offer guidance in locating low-profile, high-quality performers (also, the downloads these sites serve up are done so with the artists’ permission). For fans exhausted by the frat rock/tot pop dominating the charts, these online destinations are an exciting alternative. “The Internet is like cable television,” says Ken Wirt, founder and CEO of Riffage. “Music that appeals to a smaller niche audience can still exist, so bands that are the equivalent of Comedy Central or Animal Planet can flourish.”

Every day Riffage presents a featured artist, offering up downloadable songs from a performer who’s usually unsigned or on a tiny, independent label. The acts are chosen by Riffage staff members (they draw from music submitted to the site), and Riffage’s users rate the music and post reviews. Last week one of the showcased acts was a San Francisco-based country group called the Court and Spark (a user named Rodco called the band “supercool mood country”). Using a 56K modem, it took a mind-numbing 2 hr. 20 min. to download the band’s track Sugar Pie in Bed (this critic was able to have a buffet lunch, shop at Barnes & Noble and listen to the new Papa Roach CD in the interim). Still, the track, with its gently curmudgeonly vocals and drowsy guitar, was worth the hassle. Well, maybe 1 hr. and 45 min. of it.

iCAST also has a “track of the day” (a recent pick by the alternative-rock duo Tegan and Sara was particularly good). In addition, the site held a “Land Your Band” contest in which groups were rated by iCAST users, with the highest-rated act (the rock group Laughing Colors, based in Annapolis, Md.) winning meetings with major-label executives. “I kind of laugh at all this Napster stuff,” says Laughing Colors lead singer Dave Tieff. “At our stage, offering free tracks makes sense. We’re trying to get noticed, and promotions like this are a tool.” Tieff says sales of the group’s independently released CDs (available via the band’s website) have risen more than 50% since it won iCAST’s contest last month. Of course, Laughing Colors has sold just over 27,000 CDs in all, which is about a tenth of what Britney Spears sells in a typical week.

Talent-scout sites are exerting a small but growing influence off-line. Farm club.com has a weekly TV series on USA Network. The site (which also has a record label) has signed three artists it discovered online to recording deals. “The Internet has made more people interested in music,” says Jimmy Iovine, CEO of Farmclub.com and co-chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records. “With more people getting into music, you’ll find that there are more people capable of becoming great artists and having great ideas.” The Web hasn’t produced the new Kurt Cobain yet, but–who knows?–Nirvana could be a click away.