Farmclub.com

» see farmclub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The full name on the logo was Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com, in white capitals over an orange barcode, which is exactly the amount of 1999 you would expect. On 9 November that year the chairman of Universal Music and the man who ran Interscope announced that they were starting a record label with a website attached. Anyone could upload a song to farmclub.com. Other users would listen and say what they thought, industry people would read over their shoulders, and the interesting ones would get signed and released through Interscope or Def Jam.

Ten weeks later there was a television show. Farmclub.com premiered on USA Network on 31 January 2000, hosted by Ali Landry and the former MTV VJ Matt Pinfield, and its trick was that the unsigned band from the website played on the same stage as whoever was enormous that month. Eminem, Nelly, DMX, Jay-Z, U2. A kid whose demo had been sitting on a server got a lighting rig and a national slot on the strength of some strangers liking it.

It worked for about eight months. The show ran at one in the morning behind WWF Raw and became the third most watched thing on American cable among males aged twelve to twenty-four, pulling roughly a million viewers a night. Then in September 2000 Raw moved to TNN and took the audience with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the farm part ~

The name meant a farm team. Baseball's minor leagues exist so a franchise can watch a player develop before deciding, and that was the pitch to the labels: put the uncertain acts somewhere public and let the audience do the first round of scouting for free. Sonique and Dynamite Hack came through it. A compilation called Live and Unreleased from Farmclub.com went out on 20 February 2001.

What the model actually did was pull the scouting work out of an office and put it on a server where anyone could watch it happen. That is a good idea in 1999 and it is the operating principle of every music platform now, except the part where a major label owned the server.

~ one in the morning on usa ~

None of this reached me. American cable television at one in the morning is about as far outside a Turkish teenager's evening as a piece of media can get, and there was no version of the show I could have seen. What did arrive were the songs, as files, ripped off somebody's CD and passed around over a home modem while the artists in question were on a stage in Los Angeles being introduced by a former Miss USA.

The distance is worth stating plainly, because the whole premise of Farmclub was a broadcast slot, and a broadcast slot is the one asset that does not travel.

~ folded into getmusic ~

The final broadcast was 15 June 2001. The website carried on for a couple of weeks after that, and the last capture of a working farmclub.com homepage is dated 30 June. By 22 July the address was redirecting to getmusic.com, the joint venture Universal ran with BMG, into a folder called fc.

Vivendi had completed its merger with Universal that December and the new company had larger things to reorganize than a late-night show for unsigned bands. Type farmclub.com now and you arrive at universalmusic.com, which is the same answer the redirect has been giving for twenty-five years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »