by Steve Hammer
Entertianment/Music Editor
August 5, 1999
visit www.NUVO-online.com

(Yes, that's Booty drummer Chris Clephane on the Cover.) 

Cover Story, page 18.

Uber-Wired
by Steve Hammer

In the Internet-crazy '90s, the mass media has anointed the MP3 phenomenon as "the next big thing." Instead of AM-radio sounding RealAudio streams, you can now download CD-quality music straight off the Web for playback anytime you choose.
Grateful Dead fans can trade entire concerts via MP3 files. Public Enemy and Cheap Trick released their new albums first on MP3. Jewel and Tori Amos have released songs exclusively on the format. New albums are illegally pirated almost immediately upon release. Go to AMP3.com or MP3.com, the two leading sites for such files, and you can literally hear tens of thousands of unsigned bands. Mainstream record labels are fighting with the hardware manufacturers, Web sites and each other for dominance in this new market. Billions and billions of dollars are at stake.
If you're Time Warner or BMG or EMI, this might be true. But if you're one of the hundreds of Indiana bands with MP3 files on the Net, you may as well forget about making any money off the Web.
Out of dozens of Hoosier bands contacted for this article, only a few have seen any financial gain from their Net activities. The most cyber-innovative of these bands, though, have found ways to help further both their art and their commerce.
Digital Booty
The first thing you should know about the Magical Attraction of BOOTY!, other than they're a pop-techno band from Indianapolis, is that each of the members are wired to the nth degree.
All five of them - from frizzy-headed madman bassist Rich Barker to sex-kitten vocalist Kristy Awald - earn their keep as Macintosh graphic designers. They record digitally. They shot two videos in seven hours alongside I-465 one night, edited it digitally the next day and mailed it off the day after that.
BOOTY's members communicate with each other via e-mail before they use the phone. The band does all its own Web site work and CD sleeve artwork. You ask them to play you a new song and they fire up an iMac G3. This group might as well have modem jacks stapled to the sides of their heads.
"We'd love to be in the TV ads for Apple," says Awald. "We live our lives on our Macintoshes."
It wasn't any surprise when BOOTY! became one of the first bands in Indiana to distribute their music via MP3 files. But not everyone in the band's orbit was in favor of the idea.
"Our management was concerned about it at the beginning, because it was so new," Chris Clephane says. "They were like, what if you put a song on the Internet and it gets stolen? Or what if you put a song on the Net and then you want to put it on an album?"
Awald laments: "Now everybody is putting up MP3 files. Even Alanis Morrisette."
"Nowadays, our management pushes the fact that we're on the 'controversial' MP3 site," says Barker. "In fact, it's been a way we've gotten A&R people from major labels to check us out -- the fact that our song debuted at No. 3 on the alternative chart and stuck on No. 1 for a while."
The song that performed so strongly on the charts was called "Pornography." It wasn't a coincidence that they chose that cut for Net distribution.
"We saw that all of the potty-mouth stuff was getting downloaded," Barker says. "So we said, 'Hey, we have a song called 'Pornography,' let's put it up there with a parental advisory warning, and it shot up the charts. You have to market yourself according to where you see the results happening."
Each of BOOTY's three albums, plus an exclusive-to-MP3.com CD, are available for sale on the Web; but still, the band hasn't exactly gotten rich in the process. They've moved a few albums, but they see the true value of being on MP3.com as the exposure it brings.
"It's like pirate radio right now," says Matt Sommers. "Until somebody invents a mechanism to start making money, I don't see much financial reward for it at all."
Their Web savviness has helped BOOTY! get attention from the likes of MTV Online, which gave the band a glowing review. It's also helped BOOTY! land some out-of-town gigs.
The band receives 2 cents per download on AMP3.com, another music site, and has been approached by a new, Net-only record label, but a deal remains a distant hope.
"Until you can buy an MP3 player at Target, I don't think there'll be any money in it," adds Sommers.
"There's this great network that you develop through the Net," Sommers says. "When I was in bands in the '80s, if you wanted to talk to somebody, you had to go over to their house. It was like, 'Hey, what's going on? Can I borrow your bass amp? Now, it's like, zing-zing-zing, 80 e-mails a day."
The band currently swaps gigs with out-of-town groups through tourdates.com's gig exchange. BOOTY! lines up a show in Indy for a group from, say, Detroit, and they arrange a BOOTY! show in the Motor City.
If BOOTY! isn't making a lot of money from their online activities, they're not spending a lot, either. "The great thing about all this is that it's basically free," Sommers says. "Before, if you wanted people to hear your band, you had to put up tons of flyers, work the hell out of the phone. Now we just invest time."
"Yep," Barker agrees. "We're not wasting paper printing flyers. We're just wasting electrons."

(the stoy continues featuring other Indiana artists and their online success)