**This article is Copyright Unpublished 1997 by Wheat Williams. All rights
reserved.**

Marketing Music on the Internet:
The Artist Shop
http://www.artist-shop.com/
by Wheat Williams

Abstract:

The Artist Shop is an example of a new type of small-scale retail
establishment for the marketing of recorded music. The Artist Shop is a
World-Wide Web site specializing in progressive rock recor-dings by small
record labels which are owned and operated by the artists making the
recordings. This type of Web site is described under the proposed name
meta-store. The Artist Shop site attempts unique solutions to the problems
of marketing such music, in defiance of traditional record label and record
marketing paradigms. In Part One, we explore the problems facing such
unique record labels, and The Artist Shop's approach to selling product
from such labels. In Part Two, we examine the structure of web site and its
underlying programming and how they contribute to The Artist Shop's
particular marketing strategy.

Terms and trademarks (not thoroughly defined in this paper):
HTML, JavaScript, meta name, CGI, RealAudio=81, .WAV, 
SSL=81 Secure Transaction Processing, IRC, hypertext

The Artist Shop is an excellent example of a small-scale entrepreneurial
business enterprise making use of the unique possibilities of marketing
music on the World Wide Web.

Part One: Unique problems in music marketing

Artist manager Gary Davis, who opened the Shop last year, has a keen
interest in the field of popular music called "progressive rock."
Progressive rock is a form of rock heavily influenced by the various eras
of classical music, as typified by certain British bands of the 1970s.
Stressing instru-mental virtuosity throughout the ensemble, progressive
rock pieces tend to be quite long and composed of suites with complex,
shifting meters. In the 1970s, many progressive rock bands scaled the
heights of success and became huge concert draws worldwide. Examples of
such artists would be Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and the American composer
=46rank Zappa.

However, the heyday of progressive rock is gone. While many of the classic
bands have reunited and continue to tour, many have disbanded, and many
original members of those bands have slipped into retirement, drastically
scaling back their public appearances and recording projects. Most
impor-tantly, even though many progressive rock bands sold millions of
albums on major labels in the past, in the present, few such bands can
obtain recording contracts with the majors today.

Older rock artists past their heyday of commercial success continue to
compose and record music. Some have successful careers out of the public
eye doing things like composing for television and commercials. Aided by
the revolution in affordable, high-quality home studio recording equipment,
these artists, absorbing all costs themselves, record albums of original
music which they can have pressed onto compact disk in small runs, without
the benefit of a major record label. In other words, these artists form
their own personal labels. Now the question becomes one of how to sell
these albums to their fans. These artists find themselves in a situation
that the Internet and the World Wide Web can solve. The Artist Shop is one
enterprise implementing such a solution.

Progressive rock fans still exist. However, they are spread very thinly
throughout the industrialized world. Fortunately, many of them are
well-educated and technologically sophisticated, and in recent years they
have taken readily to using the Internet to keep in touch and exchange
information about their favorite artists. This is where enterprises such as
The Artist Shop come in.

The Artist Shop is not actually a music store or mail-order company. If we
may coin a new term, it is a "meta-store." The Artist Shop is a Web site
which lists information on numerous small record labels owned and run by
the artists who record for them. The site seeks to market and sell these
labels' albums, worldwide, through a mail-order arrangement with another
company.

There are two profound, key elements that characterize the artists and
labels featured on The Artist Shop website: independent distribution, and
copyright ownership in songs and mechanical recordings. One of the most
renowned of these new labels is Discipline Records, set up by King Crimson
leader Robert Fripp. The motto of Discipline Records is:


The phonographic copyright in these performances is operated by Discipline
Records on behalf of the artists, with whom it resides. Discipline 
accepts no reason for artists to give away such copyright interests in their 
work by virtue of a "common practice" which is out of tune with the time, was
always questionable and is now indefensible.


Fripp is referring to the fact that in the "common practice," artists sign
contracts with record labels in which the labels advance money to the
artists to record albums in exchange for the label's assuming ownership of
the actual recordings made, regardless of any royalty or profit-sharing
agreements made with the artist. Fripp, and many artists in his position,
undoubtedly needed the help of major record labels in years past; the
economics of the era made it unfeasible to record professional-quality
albums and market and promote the careers of their bands worldwide without
the financial support and business acumen of major record labels.

It may be argued that Fripp and his associates could not successfully sell
their new, independently produced records today without the notoriety that
=46ripp achieved in the Seventies and Eighties through major-label stardom.
To Fripp, however, this is now a moot point. He fervently believes that, in
the present day, utilizing such tools as the Internet, it is possible for
artists to have profitable careers by putting out recorded product
themselves, without surrendering ownership of copyrights to their music.
They can exploit the copyrights themselves, and realize modest financial
rewards in the absence of the wild risks and large sales figures necessary
to achieve commercial success with a major label under what, for them, is
seen as an obsolete paradigm.

The second key characteristic of artists featured by The Artist Shop
involves distribution. Simply put, small independent record labels with
only a handful of artists produce albums with production runs in the low
thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands typical with major labels.
With the record retail industry becoming increasingly dominated by huge
chain stores, with monolithic record-buying practices, it is difficult if
not impossible for small labels to get any of their product carried by the
retail stores. The Artist Shop is an attempt to go directly to the fans of
progressive rock music (accessing the World Wide Web from their homes) and
bypass retail stores and retail marketing in the conventional sense.

Two observations need to be made at this point. First, progressive rock is
not entirely an "old man's" music. There are plenty of younger artists
marketing their own music who have never had the benefit of international
notoriety in past decades through associations with major labels. Secondly,
many of these artists go the route of licensing distribution for their
recordings through small independent labels that they do not themselves
own. These labels attempt to sell their product through the "prog-rock
underground," in a loose network of small specialty record shops and
through advertisements in print  fan magazines and mail-order catalogs.

It is in fact through just such a small, independent retail shop that Gary
Davis chose to establish his "meta-store," The Artist Shop website. In a
letter to the author, Davis explained:


There is no actual store called The Artist Shop. However, I do have a partner 
in this venture who does have an actual store. It is called Digital Daze. 
Digital Daze has been around (but not online) for a number of years.  I didn't
want to call the on-line store Digital Daze, though, because I was approaching 
this with a particular philosophy in mind and I wanted a name that reflected 
that philosophy.

Digital Daze is a conventional small, independent retail store located in
Akron, Ohio. It has a large inventory of albums over and above what are
considered Artist Shop products.

At this writing, The Artist Shop web site features product from 17
artist-owned labels. The Artist Shop features 135 album titles from the
featured artists. However, it goes on to list 1,250 "related" titles. The
latter includes older albums from the featured artists which were
originally put out by major labels. A second category would be albums by
major-label stars upon which various Artist Shop featured artists performed
as side-men. For instance, Robert Fripp performed on several albums by
David Bowie; the David Bowie catalog is available through The Artist Shop,
even though David Bowie does not operate a small independent label and is
not a featured Artist Shop artist. Finally, there are many classic albums
which would be of interest to progressive rock fans but are not
specifically related to the artists featured in The Artist Shop.

The relationship between Gary Davis and The Artist Shop and Digital Daze,
which Davis does not own and operate, is therefore a partnership. The
Artist Shop, through the World Wide Web, markets recordings available from
the inventory of Digital Daze in Akron, Ohio. Gary Davis maintains and
updates the web site, and carries out marketing activities for it, while
the Digital Daze staff takes orders from customers, ships the product, and
pays a percentage of profits to The Artist Shop.

Therefore, The Artist Shop provides a unique brand name and product
differentiation, as well as world-wide marketing, and seeks to bring in
additional business for Digital Daze, whose clientele is otherwise
localized to walk-in customers in Ohio.

Part Two: The Artist Shop website

In creating The Artist Shop website , Davis
decided to do the work himself:


I had no idea what was involved in designing a website and investigated 
having others do it for me. Eventually I came to the realization that to 
have others do it would be prohibitive costwise and also would not allow me
to make changes as often as they should be made. So, I had to figure out
how to do web designs myself. The Artist Shop is my first web design.


Working from his own computer system and an ordinary telephone modem, Davis
maintains the website, which resides on the Internet web servers provided
by an Akron, Ohio-based internet service provider.

Examination of the underlying source code to the various pages of the Web
site reveals that the site is based on a simple HTML design, but includes
such features as:

* a JavaScript applet to produce a scrolling banner message on the home
page's bottom window border

* meta name keyword designations to facilitate finding the Music Shop
website when using Web search engines to locate information about
progressive rock artists

* RealAudio=81-format samples of recorded material from the featured albums
which may be downloaded and played back by customers

* HTML-constructed order entry forms which feed a CGI script (running on
the servers of The Artist Shop's Internet service provider) that provides
order information to the Digital Daze staff in e-mail format

* SSL=81 Secure Transaction Processing, which provides security for customer
willing to arrange payment via credit card through their Web browsers

As an additional, important marketing strategy, The Artist Shop
periodically sponsors live Internet question-and-answer chats between
featured artists and their fans using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
protocol.

The home page of The Artist Shop as well as the first part of the page
devoted to Discipline Records have been printed out and are appended to
this paper.

The Home Page

The top of the home page  explains The Artist
Shop's mission statement:


    Welcome to The Artist Shop, a music store dedicated to the independent
    artist putting out his/her own product. The items we display we buy
    directly from the artist or his/her own company. When you buy from these
    artists you can take pride in the knowledge that more of your dollar is
    going directly to the artist than when you buy from a mainstream,
    corporate, big business, big bucks, impersonal, conglomerate label. And
    that means you're investing in the future of these artists and their
    continued creation of new work.


Below this is a list of featured record labels with a brief list of the
artists who record for them. These are hypertext links to additional pages
devoted to each label.

When the page is opened by a suitably-equipped browser, a scrolling marquee
message appears at the bottom of the window announcing upcoming IRC chats
with featured artists. The browser also begins downloading a short, looped
audio sample of a recording in .WAV format which will play back
automatically in the background while the home page is being viewed.


Label Pages

Each label's page, for example Discipline Records
< contains some information
about the label, followed by a list of albums and other products
(video-cassettes, laser discs, or in some cases marketing items such as
T-shirts and caps). Each album is presented with a description, a picture
of its cover, and in many cases a downloadable audio sample in RealAudio=81
format.

A link to a separate page explains that customers must download the
RealAudio player software, available free from the RealAudio company, in
order to play back the sound samples. Davis has elected to prepare audio
samples using RealAudio encoding software, but without using a RealAudio
server program to permit streaming audio playback over the Internet. Thus,
a user's browser would completely download the audio sample before playback
commences. Davis made this decision reasoning that playback of streaming
audio requires at minimum a 28.8Kbaud modem, whereas most users accessing
the Web from home do not yet have this capability.

At the bottom of each label page are links to the other label pages and to
the ordering pages.

The Ordering Pages

There are two ordering pages . The
first provides instructions for ordering. There are a variety of methods a
customer may employ.

=46irst, customers may fill out a form further down on this Web page. Items
to be ordered are to be typed into fields on the form and identified by
title only, not by stock number. This form feeds a CGI script which leads
to registration and entering of a credit card number for payment, using the
SSL Secure Transaction Processing System.  This system, which is gaining
acceptance, provides secure transmission of information, but requires an
SSL-compatible browser, such as Netscape Navigator. Ultimately, information
input here will be transmitted to Digital Daze by e-mail.


Second, orders may be submitted by phone, fax, or conventional mail; the
second ordering page provides a form which may be printed out and filled
out by the customer. This page also gives the mailing address, fax and
phone numbers to Digital Daze, should a customer wish to speak to a worker
there. Interestingly, this is the only place on the Web site where the
existence of Digital Daze is acknowledged.

Third, customers may forego the need to submit the Web form and order via
e-mail if they have previously set up a credit card account.

Further Pages

Returning to the home page, we find the following links to further pages at
the bottom: Catalog, IRC Page, Bulletin Board, and Links Page.

The Catalog page  contains an
alphabetical, scrolling listing of all the titles available for sale.,
together with their prices, without comments, graphics, or sound.

The IRC page  contains information on
upcoming scheduled artist chats. There is also a hypertext section which
contains links to sites which archive transcripts of previous Artist Shop
chats, listed by artist. Finally, a section contains links that customers
may use to obtain IRC client software. The Artist Shop has registered the
channel <#ArtistShop> through the help of the  AnotherNet company
.

The Bulletin Board page  is a
newsletter which contains dates, times and comments about public
appearances made by the featured artists. Here, The Artist Shop reprints
information supplied by the individual labels.

The Links page  contains a large
collection of links to external websites. It is divided into four sections:
Artist and Fan Sites, Rising New Artist Sites, General Music Sites, and
General 'Net Related and Other Fun Sites.
Comments and Conclusions

At this writing, The Artist Shop is only eight months old. Gary Davis reports:


    As with any new business, things were slow in the beginning. After the
    first couple of months we were averaging somewhere over 300 browsers a
    week. At present we're averaging close to 1,100 browsers per week and that
    figure is still climbing. We started on June 24, 1996 and there was much
    investing before we started, necessary hardware, software, set up costs,
    office expenses, etc. Although we did not clear out expenses in '96,
    present trends indicate that '97 should definitely be a profitable year.

It should be noted that The Artist Shop's prices are competitive with major
retail outlets; it does not appear that The Artist Shop is providing its
unusual catalog of items at a premium.

The Artist Shop is an interesting experiment in retail music on the
Internet. It addresses a very specific target consumer, and attempts to
market the products of small, unique, and unconventional record labels and
artists. As a "meta-store," it creates a unique identity and product
differentiation.

The daily operations of The Artist Shop meta-store require the existence
and cooperation of a con-ventional independent retail record store, Digital
Daze, which stocks and sells music in the conventional manner.

Examining this relationship more closely leads to additional speculation
about the "meta-store" concept. There is no necessary direct relationship
between the meta-store and the physical store which fills its orders. On
the one hand, a website meta-store could have its orders processed and
filled by any number of physical stores or distribution warehouses in any
number of locations. Furthermore, a meta-store could change its
relationship with physical stores, ending its agreement with one store and
opening up new agreements with others, without the meta-store's online
cus-tomers being aware of any changes. Whether a meta-store's operations
were very small or very large would be a distinction invisible to the
online customer.

On the other hand, the "boutique" atmosphere and product differentiation
offered by this meta-store could be extended to other markets and genres of
music. A physical retail store with a sufficiently generalized and broad
inventory of albums could support a number of meta-stores catering to
different niches. Or each meta-store could work with a different physical
retailer. As has been noted, The Artist Shop is specifically oriented
toward progressive rock because of the experience and interests of its
proprietor, Gary Davis, as well as the fact that progressive rock fans are
already well-oriented toward the Internet. But there would be nothing
preventing the creation of additional meta-stores devoted to small
artist-owned labels creating music in genres such as classical, rap,
country, or alternative rock. All that would be required are affiliations
with additional physical stores willing to stock and sell that sort of
product, along with the meta-stores' management possessing the creative
marketing expertise necessary to address those musical markets.

Sources

Allan, Marc. "Musicians discover Internet as a way to further their
careers." Atlanta Journal- Constitution. Sunday, January 19, 1997. p. H10.
Originally published in the Indianapolis Star and News.

The Artist Shop website.  on the World Wide Web=
.

Davis, Gary. Letter to Wheat Williams via Internet e-mail. February 8, 1997.

**This article is Copyright Unpublished 1997 by Wheat Williams. All rights
reserved.**

Wheat Williams
P. O. Box 98052
Atlanta, GA 30359
(404) 636-2845
gs03www@panther.gsu.edu
http://panther.gsu.edu/~gs03www