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Grammys get Webby
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February 23, 1998: 2:34 p.m. ET
Recording awards to be simulcast over Web while online retailing grows
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Although often strained by issues of electronic copyright, the bond between the music industry and the Internet continues to grow stronger. This year, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences' Grammy awards will be simulcast over the Internet, with five days of live electronic footage and backstage reporting.
The Grammys have even named an official online music store: N2K's (NTKI) Music Boulevard. N2K CEO Larry Rosen and the Recording Academy's Phil Ramone joined CNNfn anchor Stuart Varney on "In the Game" to talk about how the awards simulcast and the increasing growth in online music sales will affect the traditional music industry.
Excerpts from the interview follow:
STUART VARNEY: Forgive me for being sort of slightly sarcastic at the outset here, but so you are going to put music on the Internet. So what?
LARRY ROSEN: So what? So we are just changing the entire music industry. That is what's happening.
VARNEY: In what way?
ROSEN: Now, you could have people around the world listening to sound samples, learning about artists, potentially buying their music. Something like that never occurred before.
VARNEY: This is a big deal, Mr. Ramone?
PHIL RAMONE: Oh, yes. The change in the industry is so vast in these less than 5 years that we have seen the Internet come to life, and now that we are broadcasting, we're able to see pictures within pictures, search on the artists while we're watching the show.
VARNEY: Can you make money out of it?
RAMONE: Yes. …We're certainly counting on it.
VARNEY: How do you make money on it? I'm at home, I'm watching, I'm listening, all the rest. [But] how do you make money?
ROSEN: One aspect of it is that when you go to [Music Boulevard], you have the ability to come to the largest site on the Internet to buy music. People from all around the world buy music through Music Boulevard's retail store and people on a global basis can buy music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have 200,000 titles and 350,000 sound samples available, so it's an enormous conglomeration of music that you can access and listen to.
VARNEY: Do I need a very sophisticated PC system in my home to do what you are telling me I can do?
ROSEN: No. The basic PC that you have available right now with the sound card and potentially video as well. This is all happening in people's homes right now.
VARNEY: We keep hearing that this is "exploding." The constant expression is that it is an "explosion on the Internet." Show me. Is it? Give me some numbers.
ROSEN: Well, it's an explosion from the point of view that if you think of a couple years ago there was no such thing as the Internet. But now you see www.something.com in every commercial, so, it's all over the place. … For music it's really the perfect application, because it's one thing to send somebody soup through the Internet, but it's very, very simple to send music through the Internet, because it's [already] digitized.
So, [music transmission] is perfectly made for this environment and, being a global product, it is available around the world. ... So all pieces fit together. Just to give you an idea, we have about 4 million people a month that come to our site at this point, [or] over 200 million hits a month on our site.
VARNEY: This is N2K.
ROSEN: This is N2K's Music Boulevard. And from the point of view of PC Meter, which is one of the Arbitrons of the Internet, Music Boulevard is the fastest growing site on the Internet around the world. So you can see the amount of traffic and the amount of generation that's taking place here.
VARNEY: Phil, is this the first time that the Grammys have been on the Internet in this particular [webcast] format?
RAMONE: The artist roster has been on the Internet. … [but] the Internet this year will be probably the first time that we are really going to see it in action.
VARNEY: At what point did you realize that the Internet might be the platform and vehicle for another revolution in the way music is put out to the public?
ROSEN: In 1994-95, when the Internet was starting to expand into the World Wide Web [and] you could have multimedia elements and graphical elements as opposed to just text information. . . . That was exactly the point when we said this going to be potentially a very large business, a real opportunity. [342Kb WAV] [342Kb AIFF]
VARNEY: Is the [Grammy] website ready to go?
RAMONE: The Grammys have a website. We are interconnected. You will be able to watch and actively talk to the artists in a sense. You will be able to have chat rooms.
VARNEY: Forecast for me how many people you think will tune into your website to watch the Grammys via PC around the world.
RAMONE: Well, that is hard for me to know. [Maybe] 20 million. 
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