[Gary Imlach:] Hello, I'm Gary Imlach with WORLDBEAT; Brooke Alexander's on location this week, and so are we. We've come to the ancient and venerable English city of Oxford for reasons which will become clear later in the show. In the meantime, here's what's coming up: We've got Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock embracing the digital age; the idiot's guide to dance music; and the brilliant world of Moby at home and play. Now, then, Oxford is famous for having some beautiful architecture, and is the home of one of the world's finest universities; so it's no surprise that when the music industry's top executives stage their annual get-together they head for the south of France. I followed them down there recently as they got to grips with the impact on the business of new technology.
[Imlach:] The main event was MEDAM, which has been coming to Cannes on the French Riviera for years. But with the Internet increasingly dominating the music industry's thinking, it was MEDAM's Web-footed offspring, a one-day conference called MEDAM Net that brought in the big names. Take jazz legend Herbie Hancock, for example, showcased in all his analog glory at a MEDAM concert with John McLaughlin. MEDAM Net, though, was what he was really in town for, speaking out for artists' rights over the digital availability of their work on the Web.
[Herbie Hancock, Musician:] I've been trying to spread the word for the past seven years to record companies that they really need to look into technology and look into the Internet, and nobody paid attention to me. I guess they figured, he's an artist, what does he know about this stuff, right? And now I can look at them and, unfortunately I can't laugh in their face because it's not funny; I'm still getting ripped off, too.
[Peter Gabriel, Musician:] It's not for musicians to decide, it's for society to decide if anything should be paid for on the Internet, because the same principle that applies to the music is going to apply to films, to software, to
[Imlach:] Peter Gabriel was another star speaker. And, characteristically, he's put his liquid assets where his lead vocals are, setting up On Demand Distribution, a company which offers a secure payment system for music downloads from the net and routes the royalties back to the artists.
[Gabriel:] The Internet has enormous potential to open things up so that, say, records that would be seen as uncommercial, couldn't be made, that the record companies wouldn't want to finance are going to be possible because the cost of production is down, and the cost of distribution. MICHAEL ROBERTSON, CEO, MP3.
[Com:] While it hasn't impacted the number of Madonnas that are out there, it has, I think, grown that middle class and allowed every artist to get their music out, even without, you know, having a big budget.
[Imlach:] Last year, all five major record labels were suing Michael Robertson's MP3.com over downloads of copyrighted songs. This year he was a keynote speaker, along with Hancock and Gabriel, after signing agreements with all five. Even Napster was showing signs of going legit before the recent court ruling against it, with the Dave Matthews Band becoming the first major-label act to release a single on the site before it was in the shops. [Dave Matthews Band, "I Did It"] The exhibition floor at MEDAM was a commercial mosh pit of competing delivery systems, tracking software and filtering devices. Of course, in a world of change, there have to be some constants. And across the zebra shag parlor to Abbey Road Interactive, poor lads who shook the world were gently vibrating the speakers of an iMac, as well as topping the worlds latest chart, the Internet top 20.
[Francois-xavier Nuttall, Chief Visionary Officer, Audiosoft:] We're tracking every movement of music. Each time a song is being played by the radio station or downloaded from the Web site, we track that information. So a little report comes to us, and then we gather that information and deliver a report to the record label.
[Imlach:] In fact, the information we upload about ourselves every time we download a song could be as valuable to the music business as how much we pay for it. Herbie Hancock's already planning his follow up to the Grammy- winning "Gershwin's World" as a series of Internet events before the full CD release. And the possibilities don't end there.
[Hancock:] Collaborations with not just other musicians, but actually with some of your customers, some of your fans. You can take material, if you choose to, and put it out there to be remixed. [Thomas Dolby, "She Blinded Me With Science"] That's exactly what Thomas Dolby's already doing. These days, the '80s pop star runs an Internet company employing 100 people in California's Silicon Valley and offering fans the chance to remix everyone from David Bowie to Thomas Dolby.
[Imlach:] Using this player, I can listen to a Britney Spears track in very high-quality stereo sort of MP3-quality stereo, but I can actually remix it in real time. I'll give you a sense of what I mean.
[Thomas Dolby Robertson, Beatnik.com:] So one of the most popular applications of this is actually to take Britney's voice off and just listen to the groove. But, you know, with different with dance musicians, for example, a lot of dance music fans like to go in and be the DJ and make their own mixes and e-mail them to their friends. And using a mobile, wireless device like a PDA or a cell phone, it would be possible to actually do this interactively with multiple users at the same time.
[Imlach:] The way things are going, MEDAM Net's days as an event in its own right are probably numbered. In a few years' time, the idea that Internet business was ever somehow separate from the music business as a whole will seem as quaint as a wind-up gramophone, or possibly a CD.