Music in the Digital Age
by Jenny Toomey

Brian Zisk is Director of Business Development at iCAST. As a founder
of Green Witch Internet Radio (recently acquired by CMGI and merged
into iCAST) Brian amplified and promoted their foray into developing
Open Source Audio solutions. As a long time community activist and
rabble rouser, Brian has been a mainstay on the Internet scene since
before the web began. He has published the SanFranZiskGo! Weekly
Events listings for close to 6 years now.

Brian Zisk is also a respected member of the Musictech list. We met
him at all three of the Internet conferences we attended this winter.
Often he was on panels speaking about the power of Internet radio.
Jenny cornered him in a sunny Austin cafe to learn more about the
development of Icecast, his work with Green Witch Radio and his views
on paying artists in the post copyright age. This is the first of what
we hope will be several lively discussions with Brian.


JT: I want to ask you about internet radio... but let's begin by
asking you what got you interested in working in the Internet in the
first place?

BZ: Well I love computers and I love how people interact. I've been a
big fan of computer conferencing for years and I've watched people
communicating on networking systems such as The Well.

JT: Explain what The Well is. 

BZ: The Well is an online conferencing system that was established by
a bunch of writers and artists. It's a way that you can communicate
"many to many" or "one to many". For example, there could be a
conversation where I post something and someone posts something later
and then I can come back the next day and respond. So we can have
these ongoing conversations over time that unfold based on what's
added and based on events and personal interactions and all that sort
of stuff. The Well is broken down by conferences -- for example, music
or news -- and then there are subtopics within those. You can start a
topic about anything you want that's related to the conference and
then people will talk about that, if there's interest. I've hosted
some of these conferences myself, like, for example "Tickets", and
"San Francisco". I had had another business previously which I had
gotten rid of so that I could come out to California to do computers
just as the web was starting.

So anyway, it made a lot of sense to me -- the dynamics of how people
were all communicating through computers -- and then the Internet took
off. I loved how an individual would have the ability to publish
information to everybody in the world who wanted it and it just really
seemed like it made sense to me. I mean, if I want to put something on
NBC I don't have a chance in hell, but if I want to put something up
that anyone can access, I can now do this. It just made much more
sense as a way to distribute information and I got involved in a lot
of things.

For example, I had a friend call me from Chiapas while there were
tanks rolling in and there was no news about it in the States. So I
took down what he said and sent it to the proper Internet newsgroup,
and all of a sudden Time Magazine was calling. So immediately it
became news because reports were coming out about it, whereas before
the Internet, there wouldn't have been any way to distribute
information so quickly. You know, beforehand someone from Mexico would
try to call Time with information and Time would be like, "whatever".
But here it's like...

JT: Well, it's legitimized because it's written...

BZ: Right, because there are people who are acknowledging it as the
truth. So then I started doing a number of projects online. I began
publishing my SanFranZisGo! Weekly events listing that has reached
thousands of people every week for about 6 years now.

JT: Now is that site set up to self-publish, where people go to your
site and just plug in information? How much maintenance do you have to
do on that?

BZ: I do a bunch of maintenance because it's picks, so it takes a
bunch of time every week. But it's worth it, you know. People send us
picks and events and we get some out of the paper, but mostly we try
to list events that you won't find in the paper, like all sorts of
alternative interesting events. It's "picks" as opposed to "list every
event people submit". It's a way we help the bands, the promoters, the
venues, and the fans. It really adds something to all these people's
existence so, ultimately, enough comes back to me to compensate me for
the fact that I put all this effort and money and time into it.

There is no revenue that's derived directly from the site, but at the
same time if I go and meet someone that I want to do business with,
they may be like, "Brian Zisk, I've been reading your stuff for
years." So I do it out of love and it's great. It helped me to
understand that if you can contribute to your community, good things
will come back to you. It doesn't have to be monetized directly
because if I said, "Hey, I need to get $20 a year for the newsletter"
then I'd only reach a couple hundred people.

JT: And you'd get only a certain kind of person, too. 

BZ: Right, and at the same time it wouldn't be like, "Brian is doing
it because he's cool," it'd be like "Brian's doing it because he's a
money grubbing dude." So I can grow my money other places and here I
can...

JT: ...be generous. 

BZ: Exactly. I have this site called Transaction Net

JT: Now that's really interesting, let's talk about that later
though...let's do the radio stuff first. I looked around a bit at the
transaction site and I sent it off to Kristin and she was fascinated.

BZ: Great, I love to hear that. So, back to Green Witch Radio...I've
always loved music. I go see tons of shows and I promote shows and I
love bands. I've always believed that the more I can help the artists,
the venues, and promoters make money the better off we all are. It's
really hard for an artist to make money. This is particularly true
especially since most musicians have no interest in managing their
money and therefore they end up teaming up with someone who very often
will screw them. Anyway, it's a big problem. So we were casting around
for something that we could do to use the Internet to help musicians
(and to have the most fun possible). My friend Patrick had the
original idea for Green Witch Radio, and he ended up talking with me
about it. Since I had a bunch of experience in the online music
community, I was able to explain a cohesive vision of what we could do
(and enjoy it). I was immediately brought on to help. At first the aim
was to broadcast free music and find ways to promote artists, and
eventually compensate the artists through that structure.

We quickly realized that in order to broadcast music we had to work
with various formats like Real Audio or Windows Media, and they were
all really problematic and not fun to use. So we figured the first
thing we needed to do was come up with an open source way to play
Internet radio.

Open source is a method by which many people will work together on a
project in exchange for the challenge of building the software. It's
the polar opposite to what happens in the traditional software
industry where there may be ten companies working on the same thing
and they'll each have about two guys working on it and they'll all be
racing to do something better than everybody else. With open source
you can collaborate and have all twenty people working on the same
thing. Basically it's a way that people can cooperate and build a
structure that works for everybody, as opposed to competing and having
a structure that only works for a smaller number of people.

So we figured we needed to build an open source streaming media server
because both Real Audio and Microsoft are really hard to work with.
Immediately after we decided that we needed to build this software we
discovered some people who were already working on it. There were
three under-22-year-olds -- one was at Berkeley, one was at The
University of Texas and one was in Sweden -- working on software named
Icecast.

I immediately sent them fan mail and t-shirts, invited them to share
our booths at conferences and trade shows. They were very happy to get
the support. They had just started this, like, three weeks before, but
we felt what they were doing was so important and so far on the right
track that it would be so much better to team up. In fact, we
immediately hired them. Well, we hired two of them. The third one
ended up in the army in Sweden and there wasn't much we could do about
that. But he is still working on the project and he will come work for
us when he finishes, we hope.

So anyway we immediately said, "We want to meet you guys and we'll
offer to share our booths with you at The New York Expo and SXSW
because you created this great software that we are now using to
broadcast. If we were using Real Audio or Microsoft we'd have to pay a
huge licensing fees but since we're using your software we can do it
for free." In other words, "You've done this thing for us for nothing
so we're going to share this booth with you if you want."

So Jack, who is the project leader for the Icecast software project
came to the 1999 South By Southwest show and shared Green Witch's
booth. We were taking musician's CDs, making them into MP3s and
broadcasting them, both into our booth area and out to the Internet.
It was a smashing success. The bands loved us. All these great bands
(and some that weren't so great) who couldn't get radio airplay in the
traditional world, well, we had them on Internet radio that same day.
We hired Jack and 48 hours later he had finished whatever college he
was going to and he came straight out to San Francisco.

So then we had a platform for running Internet radio which we used.
Suddenly hundreds of other stations and bands began to use this
software as well. So the technology evolved and Jack was able to make
it better. Whereas originally the software just streamed to MP3
players, eventually we figured out how to make it work on the Real
Audio Players and the Windows Media Player, and now it works on most
other players. So now you can use our software to stream an unlimited
number of streams to the Real Audio player. It sounds better than
streaming using the Real Audio software, and it's free.

Another interesting aspect of this software has to do with legal
broadcasting limits. There are a lot of issues about what you are
allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do when playing Internet
radio. If you are playing any major label stuff you have to sign
what's known as a Statutory Webcast Agreement where you agree to do
this and not do that.

J: What kinds of things are you doing and not doing? 

B: Well, you're not allowed to play more than, I think it's 3 songs in
one hour by one artist or four songs by one artist in three hours?
You're not allowed to announce what music is coming up. There are a
lot of restrictions that make the consumer's experience less than it
could be. You aren't, for example, allowed to let the consumer choose
the music, I mean, there are a lot, a whole lot of things which we're
not allowed to do. Anyway, we built software that automatically
manages playlists in such a way that it keeps your station compliant
with the Statutory Webcast License.

If someone broadcasts major label stuff that is not in compliance with
the Statutory Webcast License, that's between the people who did the
illegal stuff and the people who enforce that. However, we at Green
Witch Radio were very careful to stay in compliance. So we would
broadcast music from major label artists, but we had an indie channel
as well. At times we put the two groups together. So you might be
hearing the Rolling Stones and then you'd hear Sir Millard Mulch.
Musicians really seemed to like that diversity. At the same time we
were extremely non-corporate. We had a "mysterious green" DJ who would
determine what was played on all the stations. We had no advertising
and we figured if we just built this thing that was phenomenal it
would all work out in the end. So by building this Icecast software
and making it available, musicians, if they have a little technical
savvy, now have the ability to build their own radio broadcast
channels around their music.

JT: So they can just download the technology and broadcast music from
their own site if they want to?

BZ: Exactly. 

JT: So we could set it up so you could listen to just Simple Machines
Radio on the Simple Machines site if we wanted.

BZ: Yes, and you could make your own playlists and you could do live
broadcast. You could do whatever you want. So that really helps move
it along because previously your options were something like Real
Audio where you'd have to pay $60,000 for a decent sized licensee and
now, instead of that, it's free.

We're also big on interoperability. Whereas if you had the Real Audio
player it wouldn't work to play Windows Media. If you had the Widows
Media player it wouldn't work with Real Audio. Icecast, on the other
hand, would work with all of the above. So we had something that A)
was free, and B) reached more potential clients than any of these
other programs. You either had to pay for or you had to use...

JT: Their software...?

BZ: With Icecast you can run it off a Unix box and if you're not using
a Unix box as far as I'm concerned...I mean all the solid servers
we've ever run have been on Unix. So Microsoft is like "Yes, you can
use our stuff for free but you've got to pay hundreds of dollars for
an NT license. I know this is talking more about the software side...

JT: Well it's really interesting. 

BZ: Yes, it actually is. But our real aim is to try to figure out how
to get more money directly to the musicians because we just have seen
so many people get screwed by the record industry. So many artists
sign away their rights and they get an advance and no one ever sees
another dime. I mean, they get the statement and it's like, "Oh, we
sent the VP to your show in a limo so we deducted money from your
royalties." I mean, it's just horrifying what goes on so we have to
find ways to get the musicians better compensated.

I'm actually fairly opinionated on that because it's absolutely vital.
However, a lot of people draw the conclusion that because it's
absolutely vital you need the record companies to take 80 percent so
they see their self interest and they will protect the artist. Yeah,
that's a funny one. I mean, I've seen occasions where an artist
basically records something, they get no backing by the record label,
the record sells nothing, the band is totally screwed and, just to
fuck over the band the label will pick up their next album.

JT: Absolutely. 

BZ: So the band will have to break up because there is nothing else
they can do. So there has to be ways to get musicians more directly
compensated. Now a big problem is the so-called "piracy issue" and the
fact that the Record Industry is going on about how there has to be
these secure formats for music.

JT: Tell me about that. 

BZ: Well, Jenny, if you can hear music you can make a copy of it.
There is no such thing as secure music. You can take a CD and, using
Real Jukebox or some other program, you can turn it into an MP3 and
then you can distribute that all over the internet. Is that fair to
the musicians? Is that just? Is that illegal? All of these are
important questions that are, sadly, almost beside the point from a
technological level. People are going to make MP3s and, in fact, they
are making them. Furthermore, with programs like Napster and open
source Napster-style software as well as with traditional or internet
radio, I can listen to music 24 hours a day essentially for free. So
there is a precedent for the belief that music can or should be free.

Now a lot of people are trying to address this issue of so-called
piracy by suing people or by getting kids' internet access cut off at
colleges or trying to intimidate the entire listening population. I
think those attempts are doomed to fail.

I have a very different approach to the problem. I'm not 100 percent,
but I'm 70 percent sure we're going to be able to pull it off. And my
approach is, "Let's find other ways to get the musicians compensated,
because if we can do that the rest of the problem becomes pretty much
moot."

JT: Okay, so what are these other ways that you're talking about? 

BZ: Well, truthfully, if we trusted the government more, and they
weren't going to censor artists and do things like say, "You said
dirty words so you don't get paid," I think a tax that was directly
redistributed to artists would make perfect sense.

JT: By this do you mean the same kind of tax that was added to blank
cassette tapes in order to compensate artists for lost sales in the
whole home taping crisis 15 years ago?

BZ: No, not like the cassette tape thing, but basically more like a
$200 tax for everyone. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars
that would be redistributed to the artists. I don't have the numbers
with me but I'm pretty sure that artists are not getting that much
money now.

JT: I can't imagine that. That doesn't seem like a solution to me. 

BZ: Well, especially due to the fact that we can't trust the
government to administer a situation such as this.

JT: See this is my criticism, Brian. I know you want to pay the
artists, but all the solutions that people keep suggesting of ways
that artists can get compensated, other than the traditional method of
being paid for the purchase of songs are either A) humiliating, or B)
patently unfeasible.

BZ: And I totally respect your opinion and I respect it much more than
almost anybody's on that.

JT: Well that's nice. Thank you. I'm just telling you because I want
you to go out there and figure this thing out.

BZ: Right, and that's what I'm working on. Um so what I'm hoping to do
(and again I think we need to run the numbers better) but I think we
need to come up with some sort of charitable organization where people
can get a tax deduction for donating either directly to musicians or
to a fund that is redistributed to musicians.

JT: But what I really hate about that idea is that then people who are
actually professional artists who have previously been compensated for
providing a service become charity cases and dependent on the whim and
generosity of others.

BZ: Is that better or worse than having music be commerce? 

JT: It's worse. 

BZ: Because? 

JT: Because we live in a capitalist society and every one else in the
culture is at least hypothetically being compensated based on their
labor. Whether they are being compensated fairly or not, there is the
notion that, "I can do this amount of work and that work will be
valued at some specified amount and I will be compensated based on
that work value." So in this economic system, that's how everyone else
is being paid. I really don't believe that it does the artist much
good to isolate them further from the real world. To say "What you are
doing isn't work. What you are doing is this other thing that we will
subsidize with charity."

BZ: Well, what about politicians? 

JT: Well, we all know how well that works with them. I also don't
necessarily think that the majority of artists are greedy enough to
take care of themselves the way the politicians have done.

Think about, for example, the model of Ben & Jerry's. What I really
like about them is that their altruistic business model is airtight,
no matter what opinions their consumer base holds. The purchasers of
Ben & Jerry's do not need to be politically aware, or liberal, or
idealistic in order to support the causes. It's a setup whereby if you
like ice cream you can buy it from them based on the quality of that
product and then Ben & Jerry, who have the idea of how to use that
profit for good, will build that into the structure of their company.
Now if we made it a requirement for you to be politically aware to buy
the ice cream or, in the case of music, if we made it a requirement
for the purchaser to be a fan in order to purchase a song it would
absolutely diminish the audience.

BZ: Yeah, but I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is...there
are a lot of ways that money can come into the fund. The government,
foundations, rich dudes who just made $20 billion in the Internet
kicking in $1 billion. You can even have businesses where established
record labels say, "This is a great idea so we're going to donate 10%
of our sales into this fund." I'm also not saying in any way that this
has to replace the current system.

JT: No, that's just what everyone else is saying...

BZ: This can be complementary to the current system. 

JT: Well, I would love complimentary streams of income for artists. 

BZ: To tell you the truth, in ten to fifteen years I don't see the
sales of CDs totally going away.

J: Really? You don't? I sort of do. 

B: I don't currently see any interface on the computer as intuitive as
pulling a CD off a shelf and popping it into a drive.

J: What about voice recognition where you can say to your computer,
"Turn on Beck"?

B: I still think that it will not give you as full an interface access
to your collection as seeing the 2000 CDs.

J: I disagree. I mean, I'm not someone who's particularly tech-loving
but I had a sort of epiphany when I had to review one of the Jukebox
software programs for The Washington Post. Within about five minutes
of working with this program converting a CD and playing it back I
thought to myself, "Wow, it's all changed. I totally understand it
now." And this is Jenny Toomey we're talking about. I'm someone who
put out vinyl records, many of which were really extremely packaged.

But to the same extent when I moved into my very small apartment last
year I took every one of my CDs out of their jewel cases and stuck
them into CD notebooks because I had no room and no interest in stuff.
So the notion of taking all of those thousands and thousands of CDs
and having them listed alphabetically in the small space of a hard
drive where I no longer had to dig for that Cat Power CD in order to
hear it is a very attractive proposition, even to me. If it's
attractive to me, I'm assuming it's going to be even more attractive
to people who have no investment in the materialistic fetish of CD.

BZ: I agree with you that there will be a huge number of people who do
that. But they you also have people like my mom, who still refuses to
get an ATM card because she thinks it's too complicated. You know,
she's a partner in a law firm and no dummy, but she's never going to
move away from CDs.

JT: She doesn't have an ATM card? 

BZ: She does not have an ATM card. 

I really believe is that the reason people have such limited taste in
music is because CDs are so expensive that you can only afford to buy
stuff that you already know and like. So the major benefit of music
being essentially free eventually is the fact that we'll have access
to whatever music we want whenever we want it. On a consumer level,
that is just so much better than only being able to listen to the
music that I already knew well enough about to like enough to have
gone out and purchased it. So I think the consumer benefit of MP3s is
immeasurable.

So what I see is, yes, a whole lot more people using these digital
jukeboxes and Napster and all that stuff. But I do not see that
replacing the CD player for everyone. I think it will increase CD
sales in the very short term. What many people are saying now is that
music is a 100 billion dollar a year business that's trapped in a 40
billion dollar body because of the limitation of the market. Even with
all this proliferation of Napster and Internet radio and digital
jukeboxes, CD sales are still up.

JT: Yeah, but this is only the first year of it. I mean, we are still
in a period where there are a lot of people who don't have access to
this technology. But as people work in offices where they have 24 hour
access to the Internet and fast connections, I think that regular
exposure to the technology just changes our relationship to it. I mean
I'm someone who put out a lot of vinyl records. Right up the end of
our label's life we put out vinyl just based on the aesthetic that
surrounded that. And everyone in that community said, "Oh, vinyl will
never go away." But you know what? It is going away. Even as it gets
fetishized. it's almost gone. There's not a place to sell it at most
record stores. Most chains will not carry it. It's more and more
expensive to make and fewer consumers have turntables. I think it will
be much easier to lose the format of CDs. I mean, we've only had about
a dozen years to get familiar with them, and their associations are so
much more clinical than vinyl ever was.

BZ: I absolutely agree that it's eventually going to go away but I
definitely see it not being immediate... How old were you back when
within a year or so everyone was supposed to have an airbag in his or
her car?

JT: I don't remember. 

BZ: Well I remember seeing these films back when I was five: "Within
two to three years every car is going to have an airbag. " Well, it
took another twenty plus years. It's taken me a while to come to this
conclusion. A year ago when I was at South by Southwest I was sure
that CDs were going away. But considering the fact that I still buy
CDs, and considering the fact that the major reason that people don't
buy music by an artist they like is because they don't know that the
new CD has come out. Considering the fact that you are going to have
all these technologies like Napster and newer models that will
incorporate purchasing the CDs into the process of searching for MP3s.

So if you wanted to look up The Rolling Stones you would get to a page
with all the free MP3s and a link to purchase the CD. It's going to
get much easier to purchase music in the future. Now if you like
something, you go to your online record store and you get it in the
mail the next day, so even if there isn't a cool CD store in your town
you can still shop. You can go to MyMP3.com even though the recording
industry is trying to shut it down, you can order a CD through them
and you can listen to that CD right then and there. I just don't
believe CDs are going away as quickly as everyone says they are.

I mean it's pretty interesting because I wrote a whole paper a couple
of years before the Internet happened about my vision of the future. I
suggested that we were going to have these cartridges that looked like
cassette tapes that just had all these chips with music on them. So
you would either bring them into a store to download or download
through your home computer and that would put the music on there for
you so you would eventually have a "tape-sized" thing that would hold,
like, 100 CDs.

JT: Yeah, they are talking about that now with the kiosk models where
you go to a store, plug your Rio-like apparatus to the kiosk and
download any record in the world.

BZ: Yeah. I don't think that's going to happen at this point. 

JT: It seems really cumbersome to me. 

B: Yeah, it seems really cumbersome and now that we'll all have
networked home computers it's a whole different thing. Hey, I could be
wrong. Maybe the whole CD buying thing will go away, but at the same
time CD buying will not totally go away until you can get everything
you want online. That in itself is a huge impediment. The record
companies are slow to put their entire catalogs online until they can
be sure that the music is secure and safe from piracy. That means
we've got to wait through this whole SDMI stuff.

Furthermore, how good are record companies at developing software?
Well, are they as good as Microsoft is? No, but even Microsoft is
unable to secure music. They came out with their secure format and
almost immediately someone released "unphuck.exe" which removed that
security immediately. So if Microsoft can't do it, why do these record
companies think they can do it?

Now, in addition, if you as the consumer...Jenny...! (Brian is now
screaming wit

 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
(a) (c) (o) (u) (s) (t) (i) (c) ( ) (s) (p) (a) (c) (e)
 |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
information&comunication channel | for net.broadcasters
http://xchange.re-lab.net  (Xchange)  net.audio network
xchange search/webarchive: http://xchange.re-lab.net/a/