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From...
Beastie Boys in charge with new music site
August 10, 1998
Web posted at: 11:00 AM EDT
by Lessley Anderson
(IDG) -- Beastie Boys fans in search of a home got one August 4 with the launch of retail store and fan site www.beastieboys.com. In addition to offering the Beastie's popular new album Hello Nasty, the site offers an assortment of Beastie-themed merchandise from concert tickets and t-shirts, to limited-edition vinyl.
The new site is the latest artist-specific retail site from ArtistDirect Ð a music entertainment company that includes a talent agency that represents such artists as Beck and Pearl Jam, the record label Kneeling Elephant and, most recently, a new-media agency building online stores for artists.
Founders Marc Geiger and Don Muller, who started the seminal music festival Lollapalooza, have been rolling out artist-branded stores through ArtistDirect since September 1997, when they launched The Rolling Stones store (www.stonesbazaar.com). Next were Ozzy Osbourne (www.ozzy.com) and Slayer (www.slayer.com), with six big names to follow, including Tom Petty and The Who. The company plans to launch between 20 to 25 new stores in the next year.
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The concept for artist-branded online stores is based on the success of brick-and-mortar shops like the Disney store, where shoppers have shown they enjoy buying Mickey Mouse merchandise directly from the source, and on the idea that people shop for music on the Web by artist, rather than by format or label. The idea is fans will come to the site for one thing Ð tour dates or the latest CD, and then stay to buy other items whose placement under the artist's mantle will make them feel more exclusive.
ArtistDirect isn't the only company building artist-specific Web sites. N2K, which runs Music Boulevard, began doing the same with the launch of www.milesdavis.com, in hopes of hawking CDs to fans in a targeted environment. The difference is that ArtistDirect turns over ownership of the sites to the artists themselves, while running the fulfillment, backend, customer service, shipping, and product development, and taking a percentage of the gross. The Beastie Boys site belongs to the Beastie Boys, for instance, and cofounder Geiger claims the idea is gaining popularity with artists.
"As we are able to evangelize our model, it's catching fire, because of the amount of money an artist can earn," says Geiger. Alluring, also, is the prospect of having a way to communicate (and sell) to a fan base that is usually out of an artist's hands once the album has been cut. With ArtistDirect-created sites, artists have a homepage and a selling tool all in one.
So far, ArtistDirect has built sites for artists its founders feel will help prove the model through significant sales, though Geiger says he hopes to build for more obscure artists down the line. ArtistDirect biggest score to date was a site created for the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert, in which 4,000 tickets were sold online in 4 hours, generating $120,000 in sales. Proceeds for individual artists' sites have been less remarkable, but Geiger is optimistic, stating his belief that the future will be in digitally encoded music, for which the obvious distribution point would be ARTISTdirect-created fan/retail sites.
"The Marilyn Manson site we're building will have exclusive MP3s and Liquid Audio tracks. This is going to be happening more and more, and you'll only be able to get it from the artist's site," says Geiger.