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I played bass in a band in college and then for two years after college -- basically, I lived in New York and played music. The band was called Dung Beetle. We basically played noise rock, very performance-oriented. How did being a musician affect how you envisioned the potential of the Net? If you're a musician, you're really into music -- so you have a voracious appetite to know about music, talk about music, hear other people's music. I fundamentally believe that if we make it easy for people to discover new music, they'll listen to more of it. It's obvious that the Web is an incredibly great medium for artists to do self-promotion. If you're in a band like I was, we didn't really care about getting signed to a major label; it wasn't what we were interested in. But we did want to communicate with an audience of fans who shared our view -- all the time that we spent making fliers, inviting people to shows and making demo tapes, clearly today I'd use the Net to do that. We're working on programs now at MTVi to help all kinds of artists to do that -- even stars and career artists. It's the best medium for them to stay connected with their fans. What shifts do you see in the record industry thanks to the Net? I'm not a complete radical who believes that this means the death of the record labels -- they play an important role and will be around for a long time. But I do think there will be a fundamental shift. I don't think it'll be possible over the next 50 years for record labels to believe that they own the artist, the way they have for the last 50 years. This is already happening, but it hasn't become universal yet. Some of the younger talent that gets signed still needs access to the distribution power and marketing muscle, and the dollars that major labels have. So people are still signing lifetime deals. The real change is not at the artist level but at the unelected court of the music industry -- the lawyers, agents and managers, people who make the deals. That level of the industry is beginning to realize that artists don't have to give away everything forever. What will MTVi be in the future? We don't believe that any single Web site can be the ultimate destination for everyone online -- music's too diverse. We think that music consumers want more than one site; they want a brand that's a gateway and point of reference, but then use that to explore and discover other sites online, artists or specialist sites -- punk or folk or blues. We provide them with three sites: VH1, MTV.com and SonicNet. When MTV first came on the air on cable, teenagers and young people said, "OK, this is my channel." It was really a voice that spoke for an audience that hadn't had a voice until then. Now we can go even a step farther and make that more tangible: We are trying to go beyond any other television network in developing meaningful convergence programming. By convergence programming, do you mean broadband? No -- I mean using the PC as a gateway to let our viewers interact with what's on the cable TV channel right now, rather than waiting for the boxes to converge. An example is the show "WebRIOT," where viewers can play along live with an interactive trivia game show broadcast over MTV. Another example is "Rock Collector," which we are debuting on VH1. It's like "Antiques Roadshow," but with rock memorabilia -- people bring their rock artifacts for experts to authenticate and evaluate. There's a live online auction of all the products being sold on TV -- we take the results of the auction and feed it back to TV. It's a way for people to actually participate in the program through the computer, not just re-purpose content from TV for the Web. Obviously, as the TV gets more integrated we can go farther and farther.
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