May, 1997

Webnoize
Sidebar - Early Cybercast Stories
by Ric Dube

During the Web's early years, at least some independent labels seemed to understand the potential of the Web for promoting product, rather than expending energy worrying about net-surfers hearing music for free or running them out of business some other way. As early as June 1994, Mammoth Records, at the time a relatively tiny concern out of Carboro, North Carolina offered music videos and whole songs as compressed .mpeg files at their web site. Juliana Hatfield and Antenna were their big artists at that time. Mammoth got on the Web on the advice of a friend of the company's president, an employee of Microsoft. Having no idea how to go about the task, Mammoth lucked into "a coupla sharp college kids who knew what they were doing."

Mammoth continued to pioneer live events by broadcasting some of the earliest live concerts on the Internet, typically from the Carboro nightclub, Cat's Cradle. In August 1994, Mammoth held their first on-line event through their web site -- a live chat with elfin folk combo, Frente. The band was in Honolulu at the time, and after the event's organizers scrambled via telephone and email to find someone with on-line capabilities after an initial source fell through. A faxed list of local Honolulu service providers unearthed a kind soul willing to let the band come up to their personal office to do the chat. For Mammoth, it was "the definition of chaos -- 500 people on at one time." A Mammoth techie was doing a good job moderating the proceedings until a hacker took over the moderator's prompt and typed explitives onto the screen while emailing large image files to the machine the band was using, slowing transmission exponentially.

IUMA's Jon Luini recalls the first Mediacast event. (Luini formed MediaCast while at IUMA.) It was a performance by Windham Hill uber-guitarist Michael Hedges, broadcast live from the backyard of a friend of Luini's. Only a few people were able to tune in using the computer-intensive CU-SeeMe software, but the lucky dozen or so were able to see and hear a landmark "web-cast." The event was based from Windham Hill's web site, Mediacast being so new that it did not yet have one of its own.

Soon after, the Mediacast web site held its first event at home, a self-described "Cyber-Luau," featuring Hawaiian slack key guitar players and waving palm trees. Since then, netcasts, or webcasts, have become a staple of the WWW music community/industry. In the last year, Luini's involvement with Addicted to Noise has resulted in webcast-only "specials," such as interview shows with Neil Young and R.E.M. (who discussed their studio work, and played unreleased recordings), as well as a live concert by Smashing Pumpkins. Currently, Luini is chatting with his old IUMA crony Jeff Patterson about future joint projects between Mediacast and IUMA.

Today with club sites like iMusic's Moe broadcasts, L.A.Live, House of Blues' LiveConcerts and the Knitting Factory offering regularly scheduled online events -- and certainly many more cyber-clubs to come -- the Web is definitely becoming an interesting alternative for when you just make it to the show.