InformationWeek

May 4, 1999
Online With A Bullet

How serious are the music industry and high-tech companies about using the Internet to distribute recordings? Serious enough to bring some heavy hitters into their efforts.

Lucent Technologies yesterday named well-known music producer Phil Ramone as a senior adviser to its New Ventures Group, where he will help promote the company's Epac audio coder software. Also yesterday, Atomic Pop, the newly launched brainchild of former MCA Records chairman and CBS Records president Al Teller, said it will distribute the rap group Public Enemy's newest recording, "There's A Poison Goin' On," exclusively through Amazon.com for four weeks, beginning May 18.

According to a Lucent spokesman, Epac is a 128-Kbps audio-compression algorithm that offers CD-quality sound. Ramone was sold on the technology when he first heard it demonstrated last July at a Lucent studio in New Jersey. "We played some music that he worked on, encoded with Epac, and he just flipped." the spokesman said. Ramone has worked with such artists as Billy Joel and Paul Simon.

Teller, meanwhile, said he launched Atomic Pop in February specifically to take the first crack at all the "interesting methods, mechanisms, and protocols" that technology companies are making available to the music industry.

Amazon.com said it hopes the Public Enemy campaign will achieve the same success the online retailer recently had for its online-only promotion of singer Sara McLaughlin's latest CD, "Mirror Ball." An Amazon.com spokesman said advance orders for that recording "moved into the No. 1 slot faster than any CD sold on Amazon.com ever." -- Dominick Calicchio

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