Angelo Sotira has big plans for Dimension Music, his MP3 hub site. He also has atypical obstacles: Catholic high school, parental lectures and grounded webmasters.
Last year, Sotira was managing MP3 software maker MusicMatch's banner ads for several MP3 sites. When Joeli Yaguda, vice president of marketing at MusicMatch, asked Sotira why he hadn't posted some updated product information, she recalled Sotiro had a good excuse: "My webmaster's grounded. His mom said he can't go online."
Many of Sotira's programmers are 16, his youngest employee is 15, and Sotira himself is only 18. He was the only person to bring his mother to the 1998 MP3 summit in San Diego.
But Sotira's cell phone is always on. He's been part of the MP3 scene for a couple of years, and Dimension Music receives 20,000 to 30,000 unique visitors a day. Not bad for a site that has eight part-time employees scattered across the country and no funding -- not yet, anyway.
But important people are watching.
"I love Angelo," said Kevin Gasser, senior vice president at Disney's Hollywood Records. The label posted MP3 files from the band Alien Fashion Show and clips of songs from the Varsity Blues soundtrack on Dimension Music and MP3.com.
"I certainly feel comfortable letting [him] put up our stuff," Gasser said. "A lot of [people] look at his site. He'll be successful. He's in touch with his audience."
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Angelo "is truly a leader in the MP3 generation that is emerging. [He's] bright [and] entrepreneurial," said John Parres, a new media specialist at Michael Ovitz' hot new Artists Managers Group. Angelo "grew up with [the Net]. Intuitively, it makes sense to him."
It does make sense. A geek not old enough to buy beer who grew up using computers and chat and trading MP3 files gets it better than many older businessmen. Dimension Music features news about MP3 -- the audio file format that lets users compress, send, and play music files over the Net -- plus software, chat, a newsletter with 50,000 subscribers, and music files. The site also posts how-to tutorials for MP3 software and hardware and geekier Net tools like Internet Relay Chat, Hotline (which lets users set up their computers as Internet file servers), and FTP.
Dimension Music isn't functioning perfectly 24-7, and it doesn't offer many MP3 files yet. Plus, no one has written the definitive business model for MP3 sites. But it is impressive nevertheless, considering that Sotira runs the site out of his house in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Within the coming weeks, Sotira plans to filter music from about 850 unsigned bands and release more MP3 files on the site. "We're not releasing just garbage [like] a recording of my dog barking," he said.
Sotira aims to form an online record label, offering artists' Web pages, burning and promoting their physical CDs with MP3 files, linking to the band's site or to an online music retailer, and splitting the profits 50-50. He also wants to license his content to other sites.
To date, the big record labels have only dabbled in online music distribution. They're developing their own specification for a technology platform through the Secure Digital Music Initiative.
The MP3 format is popular on the Net, and unfortunately many MP3s are illegal. Dimension Music only posts and links to legitimate files. But that wasn't always the case.
Sotira started the site as a band fan page when he was a high school sophomore, posting photos and lyrics of groups like Nirvana. He started hanging out in chat rooms, and when he discovered passwords to FTP servers hosting illegal MP3 files, he linked to them.
Not surprisingly, Dimension Music's traffic was soon up to 10,000 unique visitors a day.
"I always knew [the MP3s] were illegal," said Sotira. "I didn't care that much."
In early 1998, Jim Griffin, then-director of technology at Geffen Records, began a shut down campaign, targeting over 100 FTP sites.
Sotira said he corresponded with Griffin about the crackdown and later with Parres. After hearing their arguments, Sotira took Dimension Music legit. He hosted and linked only to legal MP3 files and still pulled in 12,000 visitors a day.
"He deserves a lot of credit for recognizing downloadable music quite early," said Steve Grady, vice president of online MP3 record label GoodNoise.
Sotira isn't satisfied with the music industry's current structure.
"At the end of the day, the artist becomes a waiter, and the businessman trades in his Viper for a Diablo," he said. "Who's more deserving of the profits?"
MP3.com got VC funding last January and aims to go public this year. Sotira said it's hard to compete with such capital, but VCs have also been sniffing around his site. With an executive's savvy, he declined to say which ones. After graduating high school this spring, he's taking a year off to pursue his business dreams.
Sotira isn't wed to MP3 as a technology, especially since its sound quality is merely at the near-CD level.
"[MP3] isn't the thing which will change the entire music industry as we know it. It's one of the really scary clues to what our future is about," he said.
"It's such a large and extremely fascinating step that especially [for] the guys sitting in the big fancy chairs, it's just something to suppress [for] as long as humanly possible."
MP3.com has a marketing agreement with HotBot. Wired Digital owns both HotBot and Wired News.
