It's the culmination of a musical vision that has the founders of Riffage.com crying in their tiramisu with pious joy. They are going to completely retrofit the Great American Music Hall for state-of-the-art webcasts. New promoters will come in, book cool acts from the local scene, mix in some big-name groups, and broadcast the shows live into little video boxes all over the planet. From the Internet cafes of Manhattan to those fictional Internet-ready Mongolian yurts featured in Cisco commercials, Riffage.com is out to rock the entire free world.
Riffage, Napster, and MP3 all envision themselves as a new breed of Robin Hood, stealing music from the massive media conglomerates and dumping it into the hard drives of those who really deserve it--the fans. What's more, they claim to be creating new musical communities by giving unsigned bands of every genre instant, deep exposure across the Internet. According to this logic, we are witnessing the birth of a new age of musical meritocracy, where any good band, even without a media machine behind it, can float to the top like so much cream.
It seems like it just might work--matching the optimistic chaos of the Internet economy and the fresh musical blood of the Internet generation. In particular, San Francisco and Seattle pride themselves on being simultaneously Bohemian and dot-com-friendly. What they don't realize is that there's an inherent contradiction there, and if one looks past the hype in S.F. and Seattle, it's obvious what Riffage, Napster, and the culture of dot-commerce are actually doing to live music.
In both cities, the new economy has created a glut of jobs and a shortage of affordable housing (not to mention practice spaces). Clubs and bars in central locations have seen their rents go up and their margins go down to the point where they can no longer afford to pay live bands. Those who stay in business are forced to replace musicians with scab DJs who "spin" CDs for $10 an hour. At the same time as all the gigs are drying up, plentiful jobs and the offer of enough money to afford West Coast living are luring young men and women out of the music scene and into start-ups or conventional corporate environments.
Microsoft's Redmond campus is a graveyard for a generation that should be raising hell and playing guitars instead of optimizing productivity. But they've all long since sold out, and their wealth is creating a different entertainment sensibility, where Gameworks rises and RKCNDY falls; where live music, with its inherent unpredictability and rebellious tendencies, is about as welcome as a Black Panther on Mercer Island. Instead of fanning the flames of a nascent music scene, the Internet economy is just pissing on the embers.
Riffage.com's much-heralded entry into the club-owning business is nothing more than another nail in the coffin. After all, for all of their alterna-company posing, Riffage.com is partially owned by Bertelsmann AG, one of the world's largest media multinationals. As for Napster, it may be an outsider now, but being an Internet underdog just means that you're constantly sniffing the butt of big money, looking for a friendly scent. And you don't have to be Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to figure how the free flow of music Napster is now touting could soon be diverted to highlight the pet groups of their monopolistic investors.
The bottom line is that the Internet economy won't return the gigs or apartments it took away from musicians. And web-based fans won't get good musical choices if the next Eddie Vedder is just another code monkey working at a start-up so he can pay his astronomical rents in Seattle. Without thriving local scenes like S.F., Austin, or Seattle in the early '90s, Napster and Riffage.com will become nothing more than additional media outlets for corporate teenyboppers like Christina Aguilera and 'N Sync, whose industry backing has pre-paid their fame. When the dust settles, the new media ventures will just do what the media have always done: sell us more crap.
