Over the past few weeks the Australian Internet industry has seen a flurry of activity in the development of music related Web sites. It appears that Australian record companies are scrambling to catch up with the US, which has already developed an advanced and exciting range of music related software and Web sites.
Some of the activity could be attributed to the publicity surrounding the ONYAs, the first Australian Online Music Awards (www.onya.com.au)- a plebiscite on the best Music Web sites in the land. While the democratic nature of the ONYA awards may mean that the results reflect musical popularity more than Web design, coding and interactivity, the awards are doing a lot to raise awareness of the Internet as a new medium for music delivery. Along the way the ONYA awards are also proving to be a testbed for online poll security, following revelations that two bands were expelled from the awards, allegedly due to attempted vote rigging (see story "Onya awards marred by cheating scandal").
The higher profile being given to online music sites seems to have provided the impetus to record companies to smarten up their online images. For some great recent examples check out the new Festival Records Site (www.festivalrecords.com.au) or interesting Flash sites from electronic acts Alex Lloyd (www.alexlloyd.com) and the Telemetry Orchestra (www.telemetryorchestra.com).
But while record companies have obviously discovered the some of potential of the Web for promoting their music, Australian companies are still far from coping well with the Internet revolution. In the US as Sony and Time Warner have just made a big investment in CDNow.com, we're still yet to see such far-sighted actions from any Australian companies.
That's not to say that we don't have Australian businesses that are making interesting moves in this space, just that we seem to be following the US lead. The announcement that Chaos Music Market (www.cmm.com.au) has pulled in over $3 million in investment is a good sign from that area, while Australian companies also seem to be getting in on the MP3 act at a rapid pace. The impending launch of Sprint Internet's MP3.com.au should provide something of an Australian counterpoint to the major overseas sites that are currently dominating the emerging MP3 economy. MP3.com.au are currently attempting to sign up acts to their service, the result of which we will see when they launch in the weeks to come.
On the streaming media side of the equation, music news has been on the agenda of late at Melbourne based company Whoopi! (http://www.whoopi.com.au), producers of the IT daily netcast, Internet Old Boys. Whoopi look to be expanding their reach well beyond the realm of IT with the recent purchase of the Undercover Music News service. The launch of RealNetworks (www.real.com.au) local presence may also give more Australian companies the chance to take to host brief Internet broadcasts through their high bandwidth network.
Overall the Australian music industry has been slow to take to the net, a decision which may come back to haunt it in years to come as formats such as MP3 begin to bite. But as the Internet economy develops, we're seeing more and more interesting developments in what is likely to be an important part of the worldwide music industry in the decades to come.
