In 1995, Anthony Stonefield was a 32-year-old independent music producer when he read about a new music-compression technology that had recently been developed at Bell Labs. Stonefield reached out to touch AT&T - and told the company to do things his way. "I said that if they built in copyright protection, this would be the ultimate solution to music distribution over the Net. Luckily, someone listened. AT&T formed a business division to support the product, and they hired me as their consultant."
Now Stonefield has formed his own company, Global Music Outlet, with the first and only license to use AT&T's compression scheme for commercial music distribution. The system is three times as efficient as MPEG-2, squishing sound files to 4.5 percent of their normal size with no perceptible loss in quality, so that a 4-minute song fits into 2 megs of disk space.
After browsing Global Music's Web site for free, 20 second sound samples, you can open an account with a credit card, and if you hear a song you like, you pay just 99 cents to download it for keeps. Using Electric Record Player freeware, you can replay the song from your PC whenever you wish. Other Web sites offer music that you can call your own, but most charge artists to participate, then give the music away. Under Stonefield's scheme, artists receive royalties for their work.
Born in South Africa, Stonefield's tastes are eclectic, so Global Music features African artists such as Johnny Clegg of Juluka in addition to mainstream acts such as Foreigner and Christopher Cross. Stone-field expects to have 10,000 songs online by year's end.
Making money is an obvious priority, but Stonefield also hopes Global Music will enable artists with a different sound to more easily find an audience. But can Global Music really connect users with vital new talent? Drop your needle on www.globalmusic.com/, and listen for yourself.
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Squish That Tune!
