Prime Time Replay:
Stephen Brown on
MSN's Hard Rock Live
MsgId: *emedia(7)
Date: Mon May 12 19:33:54 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Welcome to E-Media. Tonight's guest is Steve Brown, from "Hard Rock Online", on the MSN. Brown is the producer of the website program -- which can also be seen live on VH1 Sunday evenings. Good evening, Steve!
MsgId: *emedia(8)
Date: Mon May 12 19:35:11 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
Hi, nice to be here
MsgId: *emedia(9)
Date: Mon May 12 19:35:13 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Steve, you have a long history with Microsoft. How did you become involved with the company, and how did you become the producer for "Hard Rock Live?"
MsgId: *emedia(11)
Date: Mon May 12 19:36:17 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
Yes, it's hard to believe how long actually. Believe it or not, I was doing graduate work in Art History when I came to Microsoft Press, back in 1987. Back then, Press has a charter to do electronic publishing and our first project was a very early version of Encarta, though we were only focusing on the Music part of the encyclopedia. I was sort of the guy who know something about music so moved into a group focusing only on electronic publishing. I did a lot of the initial hypercard demos and looked into licensing and interface issues. These were great times -- no one worried too much about making money which was good, because we didn't. From there, I moved from one version of that group to another. And to make a long story short, when the focus turned away from CD-ROMs, it made a lot of sense to move into online publishing and hybrids of online and CD-ROM.There are a few things that happened in between (like gray in my beard) but that's basically it.
MsgId: *emedia(17)
Date: Mon May 12 19:44:09 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Quite a lot! But music wasn't the only area you handled. You handled gardening, cooking, and home improvent sites, sports, and -- of course -- fine arts. Do you like music or fine arts more at this stage?
MsgId: *emedia(18)
Date: Mon May 12 19:46:06 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
As far as Hard Rock Live, I focus primarily on music shows on MSN. I was already producing a show called On Air and it was natural for me to take on HRL. It was a great opportunity for us to link up with a television live concert series and we had great cooperation from Warner, the producer of the show. I've always been a huge music fan, collector, musician ... and cook and gardener. I've been really lucky to be able to work in areas that interested me personally. And as much as you can do that, this is a great field to explore your own interests and merge them with your work. There is probably no better field for that right now. I've always managed to be able to say that I wouldn't just go work for any group at Microsoft just because I was here. Fortunately, the company is very diverse and has been able to accommodate someone with my skillset. I should note, however, that 4 months after I went to the HowTo group as product planner, the business unit was shut down. Oops.
MsgId: *emedia(25)
Date: Mon May 12 19:52:16 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Not enough interest in that area with consumers, or MS decided it wasn't interested in pursuing more products in that area?
MsgId: *emedia(26)
Date: Mon May 12 19:53:43 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
At that time, the CD-ROM market was just not delivering in the numbers we needed to successfully run a business to which we were supplying pretty healthy resources. The products we did put out -- Home Repair, Julia Child, and Gardening -- are beautiful products but very expensive to make and as a result to recoup an investment on. And, as you point out, consumer interest was not as lively as we wanted or expected. I also think that the majority of these kinds of products that were out there were so poorly executed and so poorly designed that they soured the market a bit. Many of them were no more than databases of recipes. Discerning consumers want more than that. Imagine selling a Julia Child book with a plain white cover, all the text in courier, and all the pictures in ASCII art ... yikes.
MsgId: *emedia(30)
Date: Mon May 12 20:00:11 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Even worse, imagine it in the "$5.99 or less" bin in a software store .... :-). Music and the arts, however, are definitely more popular. If you could just explain the difference between the two shows you are working on now for MSN -- "On Air" and "Hard Rock Live"....
MsgId: *emedia(31)
Date: Mon May 12 20:01:57 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
Yes, of course. For On Air, we syndicated @300 college and community radio stations to air a pre-recorded live concert in conjunction with online programming. You actually turn on your radio and go online at the same time. While you're listening to a one hour concert, we interview the band live with a professional music critic or editor and feed the audio to the audience with Real Audio. We also point the voyeur camera at the band. The voyeur camera allows you to actually move the camera. You can take snapshots of band members and add them to a scrapbook. There is also a lot of editorial content we provide about the band -- bios, discography, random notes -- lots of stuff, and lots of images that you can also save to a scrapbook. After you've saved it all, you can ask it to save all your images (that are nicely arranged for you) to your desktop as wallpaper. It's pretty cool really.On Air focuses on alternative bands -- Throwing Muses, Big Head Todd, Wilco, Sebadoh, and others. Hard Rock Live is more mainstream and reflects the booking of the tv series. HRL tries to get behind the scenes with the artist. There are a lot of interviews and exclusive photos and we do chats all the time. It's a great stand alone show -- it doesn't rely on the TV show much at all. But obviously, HRL has enormous potential for us from a cross promotional point of view, which is really important on the Internet right now. OnAir has a far younger demo and really appeals to music enthusiasts on a different level. I'm proud of both shows though -- they don't really compete -- they're very different from one another.
MsgId: *emedia(37)
Date: Mon May 12 20:07:34 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
An interactive fanzine, concert, photo shoot, and radio show all at once. Are there other music shows you're planning on creating? MSN is, of course, a facet of a large company that has the resources to become more fractual -- say, getting specific with alternative music areas. What about spotlighting certain types of alternative music -- Goth, punk, ska, thrash, etc.?
MsgId: *emedia(40)
Date: Mon May 12 20:14:20 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
On Air is designed to be highly interactive. It represents all of what I have learned about interactively over the years. It tries not to be anything other than an online experience. The voyeur cam alone is a great invention and so much better in my estimation to crappy streaming video. As to your other point, On Air is going to branch out a little this coming summer. But I don't really think it's necessary to focus on tighter genres like you suggest. The fact is, college radio is extremely eclectic in its programming and we take advantage of that. I will be focusing on producing live concerts on the internet that are not cybercast of existing concerts going on at some venues. They will be very up close and personal and will involve taking requests, answering questions and an actual exclusive concert. I am also embarking on a very large production with a very popular band that I can't mention right now. But look for the press release -- should be out any time.
MsgId: *emedia(45)
Date: Mon May 12 20:19:17 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
Can I guess? :-)
MsgId: *emedia(46)
Date: Mon May 12 20:20:48 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
It's a free country and I will exercise my option to keep my mouth shut!
MsgId: *emedia(47)
Date: Mon May 12 20:23:54 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
All right, all right ... :-(. "On Air" offers music, video, and a magazine article. Would a package like this be offered offline? Do you see the interactive music experience replacing MTV, "Rolling Stone", and -- perhaps -- CDs in the future?
MsgId: *emedia(48)
Date: Mon May 12 20:25:09 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
holy cow...On Air doesn't really want to be those things offline...This is really a complicated question to answer but here goes. I don't think you can replace the experience of reading Rolling Stone on the sofa with reading it online. You certainly can read it online, but it's different in so many ways. There are some great online music magazine-like sites - Music Central Online for instance, but I don't think they want to become an offline experience, and I don't think they should. We offer editorial content in On Air to accompany pictures, a radio concert, a RA interview -- all sort of stuff. The multifaceted nature of it -- all these different media competing for your attention -- is a valuable online experience -- one we've sort of become accustomed to dealing with somehow.
Once bandwidth is no longer an issue, I think there are certain aspects of MTV that will suddently become available to internet users. But I personally like to watch MTV sitting on the couch -- I don't really feel like interacting with it. Maybe I'm slightly older than people who would naturally like to interact with it, but that's different issue. Replacing CDs is the burning issue on a lot of people's minds these days. I know there are companies dedicated to eliminating distributors and even record stores from the equation but it's going to take a huge leap of faith to get record companies to change their models. It will take a bunch of very independent superstars -- Prince, Madonna, U2, REM -- to decide to distribute online -- and then there's the issues of storage -- How are you going to play the stuff. All of this is a long ways away in my opinion.
MsgId: *emedia(54)
Date: Mon May 12 20:37:03 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
We're out of time for tonight's show. But I want to thank you, Steve, for a very interesting show about a subject I enjoy the most -- music! "Hard Rock Live" appears Sunday evenings at http://hardrocklive.msn.com. "On-Air" is on twice a month at http://onair.msn.com.
MsgId: *emedia(55)
Date: Mon May 12 20:38:56 PDT 1997
From: Steve_Brown At: 131.107.3.24
This weekend on Sunday at 7 PST is Big Head Todd and the Monsters. See you there!
MsgId: *emedia(56)
Date: Mon May 12 20:39:25 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 199.183.204.186
All right! Good night!
Home || Prime Time || Live Science || Machine Dreams || Project Open Book || SF-Fantasy-Horror
Continuum || Antimatter || Mind-Brain Lab || Interactive IQ || Gallery || OMNI ToonsQuestions, comments and suggestions can be mailed to the webmaster.
Copyright (C) 1997 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.