"There are no borders anymore--either by device or region--for entertainment."
--Elisa Wiefel, Network Live
"By being small and sleek, we can try things that don't cost a lot of money that the majors wouldn't necessarily invest in."
--Jason Fiber, Cordless Recordings
Toffler, 47, runs all of MTV's networks, including its new iTunes competitor, Urge, which MTV developed with Microsoft. It'll debut later this year.
"Urge, our new digital music service, is obviously not the first to market, but we think we can make it different. What the audience wants from us is to be a psychic concierge. For a lot of people, the Internet is a black hole, and you want someone to help you navigate it: 'I like this kind of music. Who's like these artists? Give me five artists like it. Design a playlist for me based on it. Create a radio station for me. Give me a device where I can take 100 songs like it and go.' That's the notion behind Urge.
If artists are open to reinventing the way they release and expose their music, that really benefits us because we offer a seamless connection of TV to online to wireless to digital music. That's the best way to help the audience discover and ultimately buy music. For example, when Madonna released her new album, she did a movie with us that ran on TV; she did ring tones; she did exclusive broadband and dotcom content. It lived on all of our screens, and it helped her record reach No. 1 around the world. We have 25 years of relationships here with artists and record labels, so we're talking to them now about exclusive content for Urge.
Technology also lets us rethink all of the complementary content that goes with the songs. I hope we can re-create the lost art form of album covers. Picture the Strokes putting out inexpensive Flash animation for each song on their new record. We're talking to artists about it now. We can create a different album from what you would buy in the stores. If we do it right, people will want to spend time with this, not just buy a 99-cent single and leave."
Robertson, 39, founded MP3.com, which he sold for nearly $400 million. His new company recently unveiled a service called Oboe, a digital locker that makes music accessible on multiple devices for a subscription fee.
"Our vision is, your music everywhere. We want you to live in a world where it's possible to access your music on any device that has speakers on it. The consumer shouldn't have to carry around an iPod and plug it into one place and plug it into another place. If you're listening to music on your phone or in your car or on your PC, and you drag songs to a playlist, that should immediately ripple through your entire music-listening universe.
This idea came to me back in 1999. At that point, major record labels were turtles, hiding. They were afraid of digital. I started thinking about how to make music live online. The CDs you've already bought contain the music that's most important to you. So we spent more than $1 million on CDs just as consumers would, and digitized them. The only way you could get music into your locker was to show you had the CD. Just like if you go to the bank and put in 20 bucks. If you go back a week later to take out 20 bucks, it's not the same exact $20 bill, but it's still $20. We were sued unmercifully.
A lot of people are going to pay more for the guarantee that their music will be in a digital locker forever and that they can play it on all their computers and whatever phone they buy. The industry can move from 99 cents in iTunes' world to 10 times that amount. We just formed a partnership with Nokia for its Smartphones. We want to create a service that will work on any phone. I hope we don't end up in court again, but I guess it's a risk you take in this industry. Eventually these guys will get past this religious infatuation with security and get to the more meaningful question of how to make the most money."
Wiefel, 27, educates customers and partners at Network Live, which produces and distributes live performances through its equity partners AOL, XM Satellite Radio, and Anschutz Entertainment Group.
"As a music fan, I watched Live 8 last summer. There were performances I wanted to see that weren't on television, like Pink Floyd and Robbie Williams. I went to AOL and could click on any of the nine sites that were up and running for the show, at any time, for any performance, and it just worked. It was clear how far we'd come with video on demand on the Internet. Network Live was the company behind it, and I wanted to be part of it.
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