Rockbites: Startup dot-com offers morning-after MP3s

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Startup dot-com offers morning-after MP3s
7 May 2003

With a very successful first week for Apple’s iTunes Music Store, recent improvements at indie resource EMusic.com, and the start of live CD sales by Webcaster Digital Club Network, rational online music distribution seems to be taking shape. It may spell hard times for traditional record stores, but there’s no denying that the times they are indeed a-changing.
    A new Chappaqua, New York-based startup calling themselves Hear It Again is picking up where San Francisco’s late, lamented Unicycle Records left off. Hear It Again offers live-concert MP3 files for sale by download, with the cooperation of, and benefitting, the performing artists. In some cases, you can download the MP3s within one or two days of a show.
    Here’s how it works. A performing artist, or Hear It Again engineers, record a show with high-quality microphones and sound-console feeds to a digital audio tape (DAT) cassette. Hear It Again then encodes the performance to MP3 files and posts them for sale. As encoding formats improve in quality (AAC, Shorten, whatever), Hear It Again intends to offer those formats.
    Hear It Again founder Mike Corso is a publicist, activist, entrepreneur, current owner of coolsiteoftheday.com, and president of C Notes Interactive, an Internet music consultancy whose clients have included Elektra Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and V2 Records. At Hear It Again’s launch in March, Corso wrote, “Fans will adore this concept because, better than a commercially available live release, it enables them to own 'MY' show ('THIS is the show I SAW!').”
    Corso, a big fan of Apple’s iPod MP3 player, continued, “To me, the message is simple: the CD is dying and portability of one’s own music tonnage will be commonplace for millions of music lovers. For this reason, HearItAgain.net is devoting all of its energy to digital delivery of live concerts.”
    The first two concerts available from Hear It Again are Chicago and San Francisco performances by Pixies founder Frank Black—who was also the first artist on Emusic.com. | Hear It Again | | EMusic.com | | Digital Club Network | | iTunes Music Store | | top of page |

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