EDGE: Digitally feeding the hunger for new music

If the business model of Brite Revolution, a music-download site launched last month by entrepreneur Winn Elliott and singer-songwriter Billy Cerveny, proves successful, the digitally mutating species known as homo musicus had better learn to produce on deadline.

Brite, based in Nashville, distinguishes itself from online behemoths such as iTunes and Rhapsody by demanding from its roster of artists one brand-new, exclusive song per month, plus an “artist’s choice” selection — something previously recorded, such as an acoustic demo or live performance, with unique value.

“We’re trying to respond to fans who expect new music more often,” says Mr. Cerveny, one of the site’s resident artists as well as its chief operating officer. “They want to be part of an artist’s career — part of the social microcosm that an artist creates on his Web site.”

Releases will be staggered throughout each month, ensuring a regular flow of new material from Brite’s initial slate of 18 recording artists, whose genres range from rock to Americana to contemporary Christian.

Brite has a forum for “emerging talent,” but Mr. Cerveny says that’s not the site’s primary goal. “We’re trying to take artists who haven’t waited for the industry to validate their careers - guys who have a grass-roots following, who’ve sold 20,000 or 50,000 CDs out of the back of their trucks.”

Even more important: “We’re trying to cross-pollinate careers.”

The Brite model is, of course, unproven, but it has obvious potential as a convergence of online social networking, with its vaunted capacity to link like-minded people, and the revenue generation of traditional music downloading.

“We’re not a Facebook or a MySpace,” admits Mr. Elliott, Brite’s chief executive officer. Nevertheless, the site’s users “will be able to interact with artists and nonprofits in a social-networking-esque way.”

“Everyone’s scrambling,” Mr. Cerveny says, referring to the hivelike activity of an industry, a large portion of which is undergoing extinction.

“I don’t know what the grand resolution to this problem is going to be.”

There probably won’t be one — or, to be more precise, only one.

There will be lots of micro-resolutions, one of which, as this reporter has said repeatedly, is this: Recording artists are going to have to abandon — or at least no longer rely exclusively on — the post-Beatles tradition of releasing an album every two or three years.

Instead, they need to alter their work habits to conform to the patterns of online consumers who have been trained to expect fresh updates from the multimedia world.

As industry gadfly Bob Lefsetz noted in a recent edition of his widely circulated newsletter: “A true fan wants more and more music by his favorite artist. But he doesn’t want it dropped like a bomb all on one day; he wants it … spread out over time.”

Despite its status as a watershed online business model, iTunes Music Store is, at bottom, a replication of the old, new-albums-every-Tuesday model of the vanishing bricks-and-mortar industry.

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