With an eye to the convergence of the Net and TV, plus a fistful of dollars given them by owner cable giant Telecommunications Inc., SonicNet announced today a complete site relaunch for 1 March. The bigger, better SonicNet, says president Nicholas Butterworth, is hoping to invent a new paradigm for music consumption, just in time for the entrance of interactive television.
"A lot of people do streaming video ... but the question no one has met with is how do you integrate all the media? How do you integrate an endless amount of information from artists?" asks Butterworth. "In music, there are so many relevant applications it's been hard keeping up with them all and integrating them into one package. This is the first time we've put together a whole package for music lovers online."
SonicNet, which originally began on Prodigy as a chat-and-cybercast indie music site, has in the last year picked up the Addicted to Noise music news site, movie review site CineMachine, Alternative Buyers Guide from CDNow, and published an online version of the underground classic Trouser Press Record Guide.
SonicNet was first purchased by Paradigm Music last January. When Paradigm was in turn bought out by TCI Music (a subsidiary of TCI cable), SonicNet became a sibling of TCI Music's cable ventures video-on-demand and satellite music system.
The new SonicNet is intended to bring its multiple brands, identities, and content under one cohesive umbrella network, with an interface designed to more clearly link the diverse information and media. Although Butterworth is vague on the details, he promises that the amount of content will be multiplied by a factor of 100, taking advantage of TCI Music's deep well of news, sound clips, album covers, reviews, and track listings. The multiple SonicNet sites will be incorporated under a "network" umbrella, and will be thoroughly redesigned; plans are underway to build a Yahoo-style directory of music Web sites.
SonicNet plans to push the convergence of television and the Net - a goal that TCI had in mind when they picked up the company in the first place. SonicNet's first convergence test, created with help from The Box, was the music-videos-on-demand Web site Streamland.
Despite smudgy video quality, several hundred thousand users have registered and more than 500,000 music videos have been downloaded since Streamland's launch two months ago. With that in mind, SonicNet will incorporate much more streaming video, audio, and concert content across the entire network, as well as considerably increase the size of Streamland.
As a crucial part of the plan to converge, in the next month SonicNet will roll out a series of deals with high-bandwidth companies around the world. One of those will most likely be @Home, the cable-access Net service of which TCI is a major shareholder.
With the revisions, a cable backer, and a large marketing budget (including TV and print ads, as well as concert sponsorships and posters), SonicNet hopes to compete with music brands like N2K and MTV.
MTV has been one of the few music sites to heavily experiment with the convergence of digital media, and last year started broadcasting their M2 channel using Intel's Intercast program. The program, which allows PCs to receive TV signals while simultaneously serving content through the vertical blanking intervals, hasn't received much attention, but MTV general manager Van Toffler insists the experiment has been "tremendously successful - it's been a tremendous learning experience for us."
Unlike SonicNet, however, MTV says it is veering away from heavy video streaming. "It's not novel to just stream videos to the Web - the challenge is to make programs, content, and music that are appealing online," says Toffler. MTV will make announcements in this area in upcoming weeks, he says. One plan is to stream video content that wouldn't be found on MTV (coming from more eclectic bands or smaller clubs); the company is also looking at ways to make its TV broadcast videos more interactive.
But while MTV might not have to worry yet, SonicNet is hoping to change the way music gets consumed.
"How do people hear about, think about, learn about, listen to music?" asks Butterworth. "I'm not saying people are going to stop watching music on TV, or reading about it in print, but the presence of the interactive medium, when it's so deep and so quick, changes that."
