Site To Release First Net-Only CD By Major Music Acts

The 19-song album, "Live at the Greek," by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page with back-up from The Black Crowes, will be available Tuesday for $17.90 for a two-disk set. It will also be offered as pure download to the user's hard drive for $11.95. Fans will be able to sample and select specific songs they want from the selections on the album, or the can buy individual tracks, as well.

"It's legit," said Larry Lieberman, president of global marketing for Musicmaker.com. "It's a very cool thing."

A song from the album, a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well," was already quietly released exclusively to users of the site in January, Lieberman said, and the first single from the record - the rerecorded Zeppelin chestnut "What Is and What Should Never Be," was being shipped to radio stations today, Lieberman told Newsbytes.

Most of the time, Musicmaker.com is a site that allows music fans to create custom CD compilations from the 250,000-song catalogue the company has licensed from various smaller labels, and from EMI, the only major to license its music for custom CD compilations.

"Essentially, we sell music by the song," Lieberman said. "What makes us unique is that, unlike most of the other sites in our market, all of the music you see is from established artists. None of it is unsigned bands. The other sites are primarily driven by unsigned bands."

Lieberman said that most of the company's business derives form custom CD sales, which he said is essentially a form of "home taping," but not illegal as home taping is ostensibly. Generally, the company accepts orders for compilations over the Internet, then assembles them onto disk, creates a cover based on user preference, and ships it to the user, for a price of $1 a song. "We sell music the way most people buy music," Lieberman said, "which is still on CD."

However, by releasing an album, Lieberman noted, the company becomes in some sense a music label unto itself. The album will only be available at Musicmaker.com, or through links to the site on radio stations' Web sites. And the site has a 10-year contract with the acts involved, designating that Musicmaker.com is the sole access point to purchase the album, or any of its songs.

"It is certainly unique," Lieberman said. "No one has done this on this kind of a scale. Obviously, there have been lots of bands who have been very successful offering free MP3 downloads of their songs, and there have been some huge online events that have involved downloads. But what's different here is that non of those bands have a legacy that people like Jimmy Page do."

Online music distribution is nothing new, of course, and it is becoming increasingly common. Prince made his latest album available on the Web - but advanced orders were not sufficient for The Artist to make the album unavailable in stores. Public Enemy made its latest album for the online label Atomic Pop (http://www.atomicpop.com ), but the site does not distribute the record solely through its own site. In November, Alanis Morrisette made a single available exclusively to MP3.com users (http://www.mp3.com ), but never an entire album.

The Musicmaker.com album, then, is apparently the first ever released by major artists in an exclusive distribution deal with a Web site. But the deal doesn't mean that the site is interested in developing that arm of its business to the extent that a pure music label would, and unsigned acts should not consider sending in CDs burned on their home PCs. "I don't want to imply that signing bands is important to us," Lieberman said. "Acquiring repertoire that our customers want is extraordinarily important."

He acknowledged that the "raw" live recording that the site will distribute is probably the kind of recording that a major label would take a pass at, but one which rabid fans of so-called bootleg recordings would grab at. "I think that's fair, and we'll certainly continue to do that," he said. "It's certainly exciting for us to work with artists of this caliber."

Steve Jones, a musician and former rock critic who is now chair of the communications department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is not terribly impressed with the development at Musicmaker.com. But Jones, whose academic specialty now is online culture, thinks the acts involved might have signed the deal with the Web site as a way of preventing a recorded concert from becoming a bootlegged recording that would result in no profits for themselves.

"If this is a preemptive way to try to be able to get something in your own pocket out of it, I'm not surprised," Jones said. "And that's something bands have done before, prior to when we had the Internet. Part of the reason for having live albums is because of the tide of bootlegs."

However, Jones said he wonders if such an arrangement with a Web site is a good deal for bands in the long run. "You've got to keep in mind penetration of the Internet into your fan base," he said. "You've got to keep in mind the potential consequences of doing this for diluting your other sales. In other words, people have a finite amount of money for music, so if you do this, and a month later you put out an album, are they going to put out money for both?"

He said, "I'm not convinced that this is anything to be writing home about."

The album, Live at the Greek, by Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes, will be available Tuesday at Musicmaker.com's site, http://www.musicmaker.com.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.