interviewed us in
July of 1997 for her article titled "Festival Underscores Growth of
Net's Role in Music Business." The Fest in question was the annual
Intel New York Music Festival (formerly the Macintosh Music Festival),
which accepts on-line submissions from bands who want to make the
line-up. Here's part of Lisa's CyberTimes piece which features
us, waxing enthusiastic:
RAW Kinder/Home Office Records
Venue: CB's Gallery, Saturday night
313 BoweryLinus Gelber submitted samples of four of the bands he works with to the festival, but only RAW Kinder was accepted. Gelber says the Internet gave his Home Office Records a chance it wouldn't otherwise have had.
"The music business is -- without meaning to be -- a very exclusionary business," he says. "It's a tight little circle. The Internet allows you to be a legitimate outsider."
Gelber says he doesn't see how bands today can live without a Web site, if only for the sake of calendars and play dates, which change faster than mailings can get out. Figuring out the Web, he says, is small potatoes compared with mastering a musical in strument.
"For people to go out and make guitar the center of their life for 10 years and not to take the extra step to make sure this is digital -- that's crazy," says Gelber.
Until bandwidth opens up, though, he admits that the limitations of the medium are frustrating: "When you make your sound files, you're stripping lush CD down to what sounds worse than AM radio."
But he loves how being online opens up the market for fans.
"When I was in college," says Gelber, who started Harvard in 1981, "and starting to think about bands and music, if a band had any kind of buzz, I'd read New Music Express and that was that. Now, it's a reflex for me: If a band is interesting to me at all I just log on to their Web site. Everyone is targeting for the college community anyway, all of them have e-mail, and most of them have Web access."