Eminem and the members of Radiohead may have woken up in marginally better moods than usual today after the bad tempered rapper and caricature-like serious rockers collected awards last night for their websites.
Eminem, notorious for appalling middle America's parents while he sells records to their teens, won the international artist category and Radiohead picked up the alternative crown in the inaugural British Online Music Awards (Omas).
You would be forgiven at this point for wondering what the awards are and, more importantly, what they mean.
The Omas were set up by Music Week magazine to highlight "creativity, innovation and technical wizardry" in a business better known for its lawsuits against anything of the sort.
According to Steve Redmond, Music Week's publisher, there is a "new music industry developing", built on "bits, bytes and the internet". He claims the Omas are "the first truly 21st century music awards".
Fittingly Napster, the internet music sharing (or pirating) software, won the online pioneer award.
This is significant because Napster is one of the few true movers and shakers in the online music world. In fact it could only exist online. Instead of selling mail order CDs or advertising tour dates it bypassed the massive distribution networks of the multinational music industry, if only for a short time.
The industry took Napster to court, unhappy that the promise of free music would eat into its profit margins. The alternative - that exposure to new artists and genres might tempt the listening public into buying more CDs - was never entertained. To avoid paying punitive damages, Napster sold out to the media giant Bertelsmann but its free spirit continues on many imitator P2P (peer to peer) sites.
This is where the awards fall down. Arguably, a "new music industry" based on the net does not exist. True, there are individual operators, but by no means an industry in the conventional sense. If one is to flourish its chief executives must recognise that the net's strength is its ability to move information around the world quickly. That is all Napster did, the information just happened to be music.
It will be a long journey. Radiohead and Eminem's web presence are both what surfers would call "cool sites" but not necessarily good music sites. They are, fundamentally, merely pieces of PR: from Radiohead's site we know, for example, that they are serious artists who share a common political ground with anti-capitalist protesters. That may make us want to click on the next link to buy their t-shirts and CDs.
As often in the music business, innovation is left to come from the bottom up. Napster showed a way for consumers to use the net but the onus now switches to the producers. Dance producers can exchange samples and drums patterns using Napster-style sharing technology and - at the other end of the spectrum - Adam Burrows, guitarist with a Bristol-based band, Big Joan, says that being on a small internet label, Sink and Stove Records, allows him to network with other musicians without, as he puts it, going all out to impress a "record company's toilet cleaner" .
The net may change the way we create and listen to music. But if it does not, then the industry's "creativity, innovation and technical wizardry" online will be wasted.
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Napster wins new friend
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Useful links
Radiohead
Eminem
Online music awards
Napster
Bertlesmann
MP3.com
Sink and Stove Records
