http://www.hotwired.com/wired/teller.html (HotWired Trade Show Demo, 11/1995)MCA Music's Al Teller reveals why Hollywood is deaf to the sounds of the Net.
By John Battelle
The last place you'd expect to find a programming nerd and Net fan is atop a recording empire, but that's where Al Teller's unusual career path has taken him. The self-effacing Teller ("If you can't look in the mirror every day and have a good laugh, you need to get out of this business.") started out programming computer simulations for a white-shirt consulting firm. In the summer of 1969, as rock exploded onto the cultural scene, Teller's work took him to the offices of CBS Records. He was president of Columbia Records (a division of CBS) from 1981 to 1985, then rose to the top position at CBS Records. He moved to MCA Inc. in 1988 and was named chair of MCA Music Entertainment Group in 1989. Teller, who sits on Al Gore's National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, recently sat down to chat with Wired's managing editor, John Battelle, about the future of his industry.
Wired: Doesn't it seem that music no longer carries the same weight it did back in the '60s and '70s? Music is not the central expression of a new generation anymore; it's something that's taken for granted.
Teller: That's true. I wanted to go into the music business because not only did I love the music, I thought it was an important social weapon. In the '60s, there were so many societal earthquakes going on, and music fed back into the movements. It was a major force. You had black power, you had the civil rights revolution, you had women's lib. You had the anti-war movement, you had the drug culture, you had incredibly powerful social change, and the music reflected an enormous amount of that - it impacted the direction those things took. It's much more of a business now. In the '60s and early '70s, the musicians not only made great music, they had an awful lot to say. You used to listen to those lyrics very carefully. People don't gather together to listen to music anymore.
Wired:Some say that the Internet, or the Web, is the next medium to have the power music had in the '60s.
Teller:I think it could be, because online, interactive communication changes social dynamics. As generations grow up with it and accept it as just a part of life, we'll see how it all unfolds. The potential is mind-boggling.
Wired:There are two ways that the Net is already directly affecting your business. One is distribution. Tied to that is the issue of copyright. And while there's been a lot of talk, there haven't been any revelations on copyright. Everybody says, "Well, we'll have to figure it out." But so far, it's a nut that hasn't been cracked.
Teller:Well, it has to be cracked. The Internet, and online interactivity in general, is going to have a profound impact on the music business. So few people in the music industry want to deal with that concept. You have huge resistance to the Net throughout the record industry. Some very major players dismiss it as a silly notion.
Wired:Do you think they're right?
Teller:My belief is simple: the Net's going to come in a very big way. If we don't adjust and adapt, we might get steamrolled. I'd like to see the industry start to attack the opportunity in an aggressive, coordinated fashion, so we have standards we can all live with. The National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council is in the process of drafting our principles regarding copyright, but it's a slow, tedious process. There are extraordinarily complicated questions and issues involved. We encounter opinions that range from complete copyright anarchy on one hand to intense copyright-protection belief on the other. And that entire range of opinion is represented on the council.
Wired:Is there a business model in which recordable, transferable digital copies of music could become a reality?
Teller:Sure, if you build in the appropriate copyright protections. Both the Digital Compact Cassette (Philips) and the MiniDisk (Sony) use a built-in copyright management system, which is more symbolic than it is practical. It's not a great protection system, but at least it's an acknowledgment, the first acknowledgment, by the hardware industry that copyright is valuable and should be protected. Much stronger systems could be put in place to avoid rampant piracy.
Wired:Let's assume that the copyright issue is solved, and I can download a song or an album from the Web. Isn't there incredible efficiency in that distribution model? And shouldn't that mean that my music costs a lot less?
Teller:Yes! I believe in electronic distribution. [Teller wrote an editorial in the April 10, 1993, issue of Billboard supporting the concept. - Eds.] I have been trying to persuade the industry that we should focus on the retail community first, because it's going to take a while before you can do it at home. There's a bandwidth problem. There's a packaging problem. I want it to sound exactly as good as a CD we press in the plant. I want the graphics to be exactly as good as what we print in the plant. The typical home is not soon going to have such sophisticated, full-color printing capability soon. And perhaps never will. In the music business, the graphics are important, the words are important. That's part of what you're buying. So, you could invest in a kind of technology from a retail perspective that you couldn't do from an individual home perspective. This was greeted with a great yawn because there's no standardized way of doing it yet. There's no need to have six or ten different kiosk technologies in a retail store.
Wired:Where does the Web fit in?
Teller:One-to-one marketing. One of the most powerful aspects of the Web is its ability to market to a huge audience, one person at a time. You can't do that any other way. It's the future of direct-response marketing.
Wired:But it's bigger than just marketing.
Teller:Of course, anybody who believes that all of this is not going to have a first-order-magnitude impact, particularly on the entertainment business, is incredibly foolish and will probably end up at a huge competitive disadvantage. And one of the things I find interesting is that some major players in the entertainment industry, not just in Hollywood, believe they're going to dictate the flow of events. I laugh at that. I think Hollywood is going to have to fight hard to keep a dominant seat at the table. I don't believe that the center of gravity in the online world will be naturally emanating from Hollywood. It's likely going to come from a whole new generation of kids who grew up with videogames.
Wired:What do you think of interactive music so far?
Teller:The CD-ROM world is still very much in the Stone Age. No one's yet hit the nail on the head in terms of using it as a true creative medium from a musical perspective. I don't care how many people you have sitting around in a room trying to hypothesize where it's going to go - it's going to go where the people who create the music take it. So, out there right now are kids who are steeped in music, steeped in the technology, and their synaptic connections are going to take all of that stuff and synthesize it, amalgamate it, and combine it in some fashion! And then we're all finally going to look at it, hear it, see it, and say, Uh huh! That's it! We'll just know. I'm going to depend on the creativity of the younger generation to show us the way, rather than try to tell them what the way is going to be.
John Battelle is managing editor at Wired.
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