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| Magic power: Triumph axeman takes business online |
July 1, 2007 |
Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. And email
by Mike Beggs
It might not have fit the cliché a few years ago, but online savvy can be as critical as good lyrics in today’s music business.
Take guitar virtuoso Rik Emmett. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Emmett was a traditional major-label star with Canadian stadium rockers Triumph. The band sold more than 11-million albums and was recently inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Fast forward to 2007: Emmett is now a prime example of the successful indie artist who releases, promotes and sells his CDs online and no longer needs a Big Brother record label.
Emmett launched his Web site (www.rikemmett.com) in 1996. “I didn’t have any choice,” he said from his Mississauga, Ont., home. “Technology was going to take a lot of my business away from me, or give me the opportunity to take the business back under my control. I wasn’t going to be afraid of it.” Emmett now prefers e-mail for business communication. “It’s the way I operate my business and deal with promoters, managers, sidemen and agents, because it gives you a written record if an agent says, ‘I never said that.’ It also helps clarify my own thoughts when I have to write something and send it.” Emmett has released 11 CDs on his RockIt Sounds imprint. He estimates 80 per cent of his record sales come from online sales or through live shows, with just 20 per cent moving through the old distribution model: bricks and mortar stores. And being an indie act leaves him free to branch into jazz, folk, blues, classical, flamenco and—once again on an upcoming album—heavy rock. “It’s the first rock record I’ve done in 15 years,” Emmett said.
Rogers transports Shatner to Toronto
by Peter Wolchak
Rogers Wireless called the recent launch of its Vision video-phone service the company’s biggest announcement of 2007. To add star power to the event, it flew Canadian actor William Shatner back home for the announcement.
Vision is a suite of next-generation cellular services which includes wireless video calling and on-demand video, television and satellite radio.
The event opened with a campy segment in which Shatner pretended not to know he was appearing live on a video-phone call, but in a follow-up interview, Shatner—co-author of the book I’m Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact—showed that he stays current on tech developments. When we asked Rogers chief marketing officer John Boynton (left) about studies that show consumers really only want cellphones to make voice calls, Shatner jumped in: “From a consumer’s point of view, I think that’s right. You want to make a phone call and say, ‘I’m coming home for dinner.’ But this advance (Vision) supercedes that kind of function. This video enhancement is an entirely new level; now your face is there and the face of the person you’re talking to... and that is as big an advance as the phone call itself.”
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