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TheBuzz Erika Engle |
Hawaii music on sale
everywhere for dollar a hollerTHE Mountain Apple Co. has added a third Internet partner, selling its catalog online for an industry-standard 99 cents per song.
SonyConnect.com is adding the Mountain Apple collection to its selections as have Apple's iTunes at www.apple.com/itunes and RealNetwork's rhapsody.com.
The Mountain Apple catalog will become available in about a month, as Sony Connect is beginning the task of uploading thousands of songs. The SonyConnect downloads are just for PC-users right now, but both Macintosh and PC-users have long been digitally piping pop and other genres to disks and various devices via iTunes.
Uploaders of the Mountain Apple catalog at iTunes are "slammed ... but they're doing it as fast as they can," said President Leah Bernstein.
There are many more partners to be had, for Mountain Apple and other players in the biz.
The Recording Industry Association of America Web site lists 48 authorized music download sites, but the list is nearly a year old.
Mountain Apple long resisted selling music on its Web site, to avoid conflict with retailers who sell its artists' recordings, but the pull of e-commerce was too strong.
Its products have long been available at traditional bricks-and-mortar retail stores.
And traditional e-commerce sites, which are akin to catalogs where purchases are mailed to customers -- including Amazon.com, Buyhawaiianmusic.com and mele.com -- sold Mountain Apple products for years before it jumped into the cyber water.
Not all sellers are confident the dollar-a-holler tack is the best to take.
"As a retailer, there's not much margin to begin with," said Chris Leonard, founder and general manager of Buyhawaiianmusic.com. Between the artist, the record label and the retailer, "at 99 cents, I'm not sure that's a model that works for us," he said. "I will tell you I very closely watch the digital download model and looked at options for us, but at this point we're still observing the model."
The Web site offers some music snippets for some songs by some artists, but there are licensing issues, he said.
For Mountain Apple, the light bulb over its corporate head also illuminated a way to keep out-of-print material available to the buying public, without the expense of additional pressings. (Is that term still used in this post-vinyl world?)
"The Brothers Cazimero have recorded 36 albums. They're on their 37th, but not all of them are still on the market," Bernstein said. Their out-of-print recordings are among the works that could become available exclusively at the downloading sites.
The new arrangement comes as the Hawaiian music industry finds itself atop either the crest of a wave or the tip of an iceberg.
A huge bank of Super Trooper spotlights is being primed to cast its blinding rays on the local recording industry, now that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has established a Best Hawaiian Music Album category for its annual awards.
In a timing coup, Honolulu Magazine just released a special collectors issue featuring its compilation of the 50 greatest Hawaii albums of all time.
Though singing local songs was not an option for her, Jasmine Trias showed America that Hawaii is serious about music.
Note the distinction. Not all of Hawaii's music is Hawaiian music, just as all people who live in Hawaii should not be referred to as "Hawaiian." To do so is disrespectful.
At night spots around the islands, some visitors request the house band play "something Hawaiian," like Israel Kamakawiwoole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World," because of the now worldwide popularity of his 1993 recording of the medley. Those people have not yet read this column and should therefore be excused.
Hawaii's next big international star may be Don Tiki, an eclectic group of musicians that has brought back the genre known as exotica, for which Martin Denny is best known.
Don Tiki is actually on the Taboo Records label, but one of Mountain Apple's professional services is music licensing, which is how Kamakawiwoole's music has come to be the sensation it is around the world.
Through a deal brokered by Mountain Apple, a soon to be released remix of the song "Other Side of the Moon" -- originally featured on the album, "Skinny Dip with Don Tiki" -- was used in a commercial for Samsung's LCD television that debuted May 15.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin. Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210, Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached at: eengle@starbulletin.com