AllThingsD » Cher

Mossberg Does Moby: Video and More!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:43:58 +0000

Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.

The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.

Here are three video clips from the event:

[ See post to watch video ]

If you prefer to read, here is a live blog that Michelle Kung did of the event to enjoy:

7:30 p.m.–Out of the steaming heat and into the cool, air-conditioned confines of Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse.

7:39 p.m.–The lights dim and Moby and Mossberg make their entrances. Moby slinks down in his chair (“Am I greasy, or is it the chair?”) just before WSJ culture editor Christopher John Farley introduces the pair.

7:43 p.m.–Mossberg plugs his son, who’s in a band, before asking Moby–whose real name is Richard Melville Hall–if he is really related to “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville. Moby replies that that is what his parents have always told him and explains the origins of his moniker: “When I was 11 minutes old, my parents looked at me and I was this little grub of a baby and my mother said, Richard Melville Hall is a very grown up name, and my father said jokingly, let’s call him ‘Moby.’ All these years later, I still have this name I’ve have from infancy.”

7:46 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby, in between jokes about being both being bald-ish, about the difference between “Play” and his new album, “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by talking about how the success of “Play” completely surprised him, because he was considered a “has been” by the time the album was originally released in the early 1990s and that Rolling Stone refused to review the album. His success with the album also confused him, because he was unsure of his next step–was he supposed to listen to the label now? To the fans? To himself?

“Wait for Me,” his ninth studio album, was designed as a return to simplicity, and created with old instruments–many of which were purchased on eBay–in his bedroom in Manhattan. When Mossberg asks Moby to clarity what he means by “his bedroom,” the musicians lays out out his floorplan–he lives in a two-bedroom apartment on Mott Street and with a small space (“two people starts to feel claustrophobic”) set aside for his music work.

7:52 p.m.–Moby uses a Mossberg question as an excuse to slam Jay Leno, whom he calls the “least prepared interviewer.” He fakes a Leno voice, and mock interviews: “So Moby, you have a new record. Tell me about it.” Mossberg interjects, “So I have a low bar?” to the delight of the crowd.

7:53 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby how he used technology in “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by explaining that while he loves technology, he don’t fetishize it like some of his friends. “I have an 18″ flat screen TV. A bigger screen doesn’t make TV any better. ‘Family Guy’ is still funny on a little TV. If it works and doesn’t cause me undue stress, I love it.’

7:55 p.m.–Moby launches into an explanation of what Pro Tools and plugins are, and how thanks to this nifty recording/mixing operating system, he can take prerecorded “notes” that have been recorded abroad, say, in places like Vienna, and then recreate a 60-piece orchestra on his keyboard.

7:59 p.m.–On to issues of intellectual property. Moby says: “I don’t mind when people pirate my music–if you want to steal my music, more power to you.” Mossberg immediately asks, “Why?” And he deadpans, “Deep-seated emotional issues.” He then goes on to explain that personally, he’s so honored that people want to listen to his music, he doesn’t want to restrict access to it. “I don’t have alimony, I don’t need insulin…I don’t have crystal meth problems.” Thus, he personally doesn’t mind, but he can only speak for himself. But to clarify, he does want you to buy his album so his friends at the label are happy.

8:04 p.m.–Mossberg and Moby discuss the RIAA’s decision to sue customers. Moby says that it’s never been cheaper to make music, videos, and promote albums. EMI, he thinks, broke even. So why are they alienating their customers?

8:06 p.m.–Blind item alert! Moby says that a few years ago, he was talking to a record label head, and when he asked the top honcho about their iTunes plan for their biggest star’s newest album, he was told, oh, we’re going to wait a couple months.

Moby then launches into philosophy mode and brings up the is/ought fallacy to illustrate his point, noting that the current music model “underpins the failure of major labels–they think, it used to be this way, so it ought to be this way.” Their ethos is, “Please go away. Make the future die.” Mossberg suggests he write a song/album with that title. Moby quips back with “Young People Suck” as a potential label-inspired tune.

8:12 p.m.–Moby adds a qualifier to his comments, touting Mute, his own record label. “Mute is wonderful, and they care about music–it’s the big major labels who have been egregiously bad stewards of music. It’s hard to feel bad for them when they’ve brought us some of the worst music ever created.” He then gets in a dig at Lars Ulrich of Metallica, saying that if he needs a “fur-lined walking humidor,” that’s him.

8:15 p.m.–Moby asks the audience if he can get pedantic for a moment. They cheer their assent. He then launches into a story about the early days of the Beatles, a band that got “lucky” because everything they did was in mono. “The first ‘Meet the Beatles’ was recorded in four hours. They played the songs and it was done.” He explains how this is not possible anymore.

8:18 p.m.–Yay! Moving on to a discussion about Auto-Tune, which “enables anyone to fake perfect pitch.” Moby declines to name names in his anecdotes, because he has enough feuds already, but singles out Cher’s “I Believe” as the first of the supremely auto-tuned songs, and mourns how kids can’t recognize real singing anymore. Next, a discussion of playback, aka the technology that failed Ashlee Simpson when she was reduced to her now infamous hoedown on “Saturday Night Live.”

8:23 p.m.–Memory lane for Mossberg. He recalls seeing the Supremes, and Simon & Garfunkel in the ’60s for $3/ticket in a gym, and how the concerts back then used to sound just like the album. But everything is much more complicated now.

8:25 p.m.–Moby talks about how he plays to bigger crowds in Europe, and how he can enjoy the concert experience. Playing in front of a big crowd, he says, with big production values, is the musician’s equivalent of playing the big penis card.

8:28 p.m.–Mossberg asks: When you make music, do you have to consider the fact that it’s going to be listened to on [Apple] iPods and [Microsoft] Zunes? Moby says sadly yes, and tells a story about how super-processed music works on the subway, because the noise of the L train doesn’t interfere with, say, a song by Rihanna, but the subtleties of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” will get lost.

8:32 p.m.–Mossberg moves on to playing a snippet of the song “Pale Horses” from “Wait for Me” because we’re running late, and Moby says he has to pee–”Syphilis is a demanding mistress.” Mossberg: “Bill Gates doesn’t say that to me…I can’t believe I’m defending Microsoft.” Moby: “I’m just saying the Zune is clumsy as hell.” [For those lacking the implied sarcasm, Moby clarifies later on that he does not, in fact, have syphilis.]

Moby on “Pale Horses” and many of his other songs: 80% of the work is done in a couple days, but it’s the finishing stuff that is what really takes a really long time. To get the job done, he holes himself with the music–”Hopefully, a more benign version of Ted Kaczynski during the creative process.”

8:40 p.m.–Audience Q&A time. Moby is asked about his licensing deals, and says he doesn’t license music anymore, because he’s sick of being the whipping boy for the process. Which is ironic, because everyone’s selling out now. He adds that he initially licensed the music for “Play,” because it allowed more people to hear the album.

8:46 p.m.–Moby interrupts a question-asker to comment on how he wishes the stage were against the left window like a previous panel he was on, so everyone could get a glimpse of the view. The questioner then proceeds to take out a Chilean flag and hold it up before asking Moby if there’s relationship between his music and the cosmos. The short answer? Yes.

8:51 p.m.–Mossberg sums up the evening and offers kudos to Moby for sharing his time and process.

8:52 p.m.–Moby plugs a new tour date in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And good night everybody!

And, here is a rather unusual cartoon video of Moby being interviewed by a dog that the Journal did:

[ See post to watch video ]

And, here is a video of Moby last week, talking about the digital impact of the music, in an interview on the Leonard Lopate radio show on WNYC:

Finally, here is a Q&A that Walt did with Flavorpill’s Caroline Stanley about a range of tech trends, as a preview to the event.

[Moby photo credit: AFP/Getty]

When GeoCities Grabbed the Web's Golden Ticket–A Trip Down Silicon-Valley-Has-No-Memory Lane

Kara Swisher — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:13:39 +0000

In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.

Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.

GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time.

But instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders,” since the Web then was a place to be pioneered and settled.

As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Except they did. Yahoo (YHOO) announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.

But a full decade ago, the Yahoo-GeoCities transaction was a big, big deal, struck at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble.

The move shook up the then-Internet landscape, in which Yahoo was the undisputed king.

The sector then had begun to rapidly consolidate, as stronger players snapped up weaker ones in a race for market share.

The Yahoo-GeoCities deal closely followed another deal in which At Home, a high-speed Internet access service, bought search and directory service Excite for stock valued at $6.7 billion. In another key deal at the time, then-independent America Online agreed to buy Netscape Communications for stock then worth $4.2 billion.

Of those then-dominant Web companies, only Yahoo and AOL–now a troubled unit of Time Warner (TWX)–survive relatively intact.

And, what exactly did Yahoo get for its giant payment back then? A money-losing, low-revenue company with a whole lot of users.

At the time of the purchase, the publicly-traded Marina Del Rey, Calif., company had reported that fourth-quarter sales increased to $7.5 million from $1.7 million a year earlier. But the company’s loss had also swelled, to $8.4 million from $3 million, in the year-earlier period.

Sound familiar to some current Web 2.0 stories? I thought so.

Another weird irony: One of GeoCities major investors was a venture firm called Flatiron Partners, whose principal, Jerry Colonna, was on the board.

And who was Colonna’s parter? Well, Fred Wilson, who has a different firm now called Union Square Ventures and is–wait for it–one the the major investors in the 2009 hotsy-totsy start-up, Twitter.

(You can read Wilson’s terrific take from the VC perspective of the GeoCities experience here.)

In other words, the more things change… Well, actually, they don’t change.

So, if you want to take an instructive trip down memory lane, here is my piece below, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 29, 1999:

Those Who Tied Fortune to GeoCities Yell Yahoo! All the Way to the Bank

By KARA SWISHER | Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Last spring, Thomas R. Evans was nervous about leaving his longtime job at the top of a powerful Manhattan media company for an Internet start-up near the beaches of Southern California. So he talked to his boss, real-estate and publishing tycoon Mort Zuckerman.

“I was wondering if this whole Internet thing was real and sustainable,” says Mr. Evans, then publisher of the Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News & World Report. “I wanted his blessing in a way.”

Virtual Payoff

Mr. Evans got Mr. Zuckerman’s nod–and a lot more. You know the drill by now (though it may not be getting any easier to hear). He became chief executive officer of GeoCities , an electronic casbah of about 3.5 million Web sites, and helped lead its initial public offering last summer. Then Thursday, Yahoo! Inc. agreed to buy the young company for about $5 billion in stock. It means the value of Mr. Evans’s stock options soared by 65% Thursday to a dizzying $200 million.

Yahoo! Agrees to Buy GeoCities in $5 Billion Stock Transaction

That’s some kind of money for nine months’ work. After you’re done banging your head on a wall, consider that members of the new financial elite in Silicon Valley are being created in less time than it takes for a kid to finish his first-grade year. That puts oil, real estate and finance magnates to shame. Mr. Zuckerman, for example, spent a lifetime building his $1 billion financial empire.

Asked how he was doing Thursday, Mr. Zuckerman says: “Not as good as Tom Evans.”

Mr. Evans, who commutes between GeoCities’ Marina Del Rey, Calif., headquarters and his home in New Canaan, Conn., is quick to point out the ephemeral nature of his wealth. He must wait six years for his options to be fully vested. And his net worth could evaporate if Yahoo’s highflying stock sinks.

“It does not seem real, because it is not real, because this is based on the long term and is dependent on where this whole industry is going,” says Mr. Evans, 44 years old. “Anyone coming into this industry assumes a certain amount of risk because no one really knows how it is all going to turn out.”

Litany of Lucre

It has turned out well so far for the new moguls at GeoCities. According to public filings the company made last summer, the biggest individual winner is co-founder and Chairman David Bohnett, 42, who owns about three million shares outright, now worth $367 million, based on Yahoo’s closing price Thursday. Mr. Bohnett insists he is overlooking that bit of extra money. “I do not see this as a financial event,” he says. “And we did not start this company with money in mind.”

Chief Technical Officer John Rezner, 35, who worked nine years for aerospace company McDonnell Douglas Corp. before co-founding GeoCities, holds 827,000 shares worth $103 million.

The management team that came in with Mr. Evans last year–taking over from Mr. Bohnett to help with the IPO–is also well-situated. Chief Financial Officer Stephen Hansen, 42, who formerly held the same position at Universal Studios Hollywood, has options for about 600,000 shares of stock, which would be worth $74.7 million at current prices. Michael Barrett, 36, advertising vice president and former online executive with Walt Disney Co., has options for 280,000 shares, worth about $34.9 million.

There are, of course, all kinds of gnashing of teeth over whether the Internet entrepreneurs deserve such riches. But obtaining great wealth through luck or artful maneuvering is nothing new in American business history. Take the stock manipulators of the 1890s and the leveraged-buyout artists of the 1980s. It may be some consolation that GeoCities’ founders can claim that they developed something that is used by many people. In its December Web-traffic report, research firm Media Metrix says the “GeoCities.com” Web site ranked third, behind America Online Inc. and Yahoo, with nearly 19 million different visitors.

Mr. Bohnett says the company was born from a “passion for giving people a chance to speak up.” Founded in 1994, GeoCities was one of the first Web-based communities, where users post individualized sites to express themselves.

Dubbed “homesteaders,” these customers create the bulk of the content on GeoCities. Their Web pages are organized into “neighborhoods” of personal interests and hobbies, such as personal finance or motorcycles, and monitored by a network of volunteers.

“My goal was to stake out a broader territory and create a community of interests, just in the same way Yahoo was helping people find their way around the Web,” says Mr. Bohnett, who led the company in a variety of top jobs, including chief financial officer, CEO and president. “Then we were going to monetize that base of users as the business model emerged.”

That model for profitability hasn’t yet arrived, in part because the company spends heavily to increase its market share. Thursday, it announced a net loss for last year of $18.2 million on revenue of $18.4 million.

Mr. Evans, a dark-haired man with a preppy demeanor and razor wit, has plenty of experience building businesses. He worked his way up in Mr. Zuckerman’s organization from sales and advertising jobs, and eventually served as president and publisher of several magazines.

After being approached several times about new-media positions, Mr. Evans says he decided to jump to GeoCities when the importance of the Internet became clear to him. “I think that by the time I really took a look at it, the whole sector had matured and gotten really interesting for those of us in the traditional media companies,” he says.

While Mr. Evans is loath to discuss the valuations of Internet companies, his former boss Mr. Zuckerman doesn’t dodge the opportunity to be philosophical about Web mania.

“It’s like they said in high school: ‘Boys will be boys and girls will be girls,’” Mr. Zuckerman says. “I don’t want to change anything, I just want to get in on it.”