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Beta Lounge
betalounge.com / smash.tv / betalounge.de
'Ole Lütjens
Ole Lütjens
The Beta Lounge team (aka the Network Syndicate/SmashTV) directly link live performance, Van Gogh TV’s Piazza virtuale, Cityspace, Hotwired, Netscape, independent media, black American HipHop culture, science fiction writing, MP3 and San Francisco bike messaging with Pirate Radio, SetTopBoxes, L.A. style entertainment, solar eclipse webcasts from Africa and the return of the DJ to the decks and his appearance on the net.
The references stretch far from the recent history of media art and “internet revolution” into the present of .com crash survival and the re-claiming of market territory by the “old” capitalistic forces, from HyperCard controlled art installations via interactive TV experiments to multi-user driven virtual reality environments and web-based collaboration tools. The Network Syndicate has managed to establish a social and economic hybrid that successfully shifts between art experiment and industry standard technology implementation, without losing the focus of staying conceptually and financially independent.
A strong belief that freedom can ultimately only be achieved by dedicating energy to the things we believe in has kept us as a group at a healthy distance from the sometimes incredibly blunt and aggressive attempts of investors to take financial control. At times, of course, it was tempting, but the recent downfall of internet company arrogance has proven this attitude to be life-saving.THE LIVING TIME CAPSULE The Beta Lounge is the longest running and most widely known live electronic music showcase on the web, with a loyal, steadily increasing, monthly worldwide audience of 450,000 listeners. It offers a forum for experimental electronic music for producers and for people just consuming. The first Beta Lounge was aired in August 1996 from a corner studio in San Francisco’s Mission District and has since grown into a weekly webcast from a studio in the socalled “Dogpatch” district south of China Basin. This weekly live web event is a cross between a radio show, a television broadcast and an underground warehouse party. High quality live video and audio feeds, an online chat room, and downloadable tracks, enable a worldwide viewership to interact with a San Francisco in-studio audience. All performances are archived and immediately available on the web site following the show.
Since 1996 this archive has grown to the almost “Smithsonian” size of about 3000 hours of DJ skill documentation, from the rise of Drum ‘n Bass in California via Clicks and Cuts and Laptop art to the recent success of West-London style Nu-jazz. Even short lived styles like 2Step are captured at the height of their popularity.“We are primarily interested in the live performance aspects of the show and were quickly surprised after the first few months of operation by how much traffic the archive section received. So our challenge has been to present a carefully curated selection of media. Our archive section is important because it WAS ONCE LIV E, and is available at any given time from any location with net access. This is one of the main differences between the Beta Lounge and most other music available online (and anywhere else for that matter). It's important that anyone can feel like they were/are at the Lounge, and that they can choose how to interact with the material presented at will.”
Brian Benitez
BETA LOUNGE / CONCEPT AND CULTURAL BEDDING “... live transmissions from a weekly in-studio party featuring local and international DJs...” Seems basic today, but in ’96, live DJs playing "underground” music on the internet was kind of crazy. The live streams sounded like field recordings of blues musicians from the early 20th century ... and then electronic dance music? The American music industry hadn’t bothered with the funk since the commercial heyday of disco in the 70’s. In the 90’s, a thriving DJ culture was largely underground and homegrown US talent went overseas, just like jazz musicians and 60’s rock icons, looking to make a living and connect with their audience. So it was with appropriate West Coast pioneering spirit that the Beta Lounge began weekly live DJ webcasts to the world from San Francisco’s Mission District. Although at times it was like shouting into a hole in the ground, the Beta Lounge made sense in the context of San Francisco’s vibrant new music community. The weekly sets, in-studio audience, and growing online archive became an integral part of the US contribution to global DJ culture. Meanwhile, mainstream commercial radio cannibalized itself—aside from FM “college radio” there was no other way to hear anything new. The internet appeared as a possible alternative to the heavily programmed modern-classic-rock-pop-Rn’B hotchpotch. Today the landscape is decidedly different. The future promise of digital music distribution is widely accepted. The online music industry is affecting old school methods of artist development and promotion, and the dance music industry is infiltrating the US culture market with major studio film releases, historical surveys, electronic music festivals, and retrospective “10 year anniversary” music compilations. The Beta Lounge has charted the course of dance music on the internet from the beginning, and has emerged as one of the leading independent voices on the web.UPLINK ANYWHERE Maybe one of the main reasons the beta lounge continues to survive the up and downs of the market is because as a group we are less concerned about an “internet/ technology revolution” and more interested in a “communication revolution." This idea surfaces in all the different Network Syndicate and SmashTV undertakings as particular focus on the social context of each project and how technology can facilitate community development. We believe that in the end it doesn't matter what streaming media player you use, just as long as you can hear the DJ or watch the solar eclipse.We've never thought of the Beta Lounge as an “internet radio station.” The event, and audience participation in producing the event, has always been the focal point. The Lounge exists only within the social context of the DJs, producers and enthusiasts who “live" the music. So in those terms the Lounge is not necessarily about a particular location or studio or city. It can be anywhere people care about music and want to control how it is distributed and presented to the world.”
Ian Raikow The Beta Lounge recently spun off the “Record Club,” a subscription system that delivers our musical taste to our audience in the form of a finished product, thus bridging the gap between what they hear on the show as part of the mix, and the impulse to get it. Around the “Record Club” a very active mailing list evolved where the international listening community is in constant daily dialog about new music, the beta lounge archives, etc. In Europe the Beta Lounge has teamed up with an industry partner to engineer a series of pioneering webcast events that link musicians and DJ´ s from remote locations to events at places that are often 9 time zones and more away. This experiment is a logical consequence of the international genetic architecture of our team (team members are from Brazil, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, North America, Kenia and Romania). We also recently started to cooperate with a group in Tokio that is producing the “Digital Convenience Sessions” for the Beta Lounge, featuring the latest from Japan’s electronic music scene.“We’ve been in three different studios in SF, only really exist in the current location when the show is live, and have even been covered by the media (Sleazenation) as a weekly club night in Barcelona. Add to this the number of clubs and weird locations we’ve wired with ISDN, and the instances of the Lounge begin to appear more like a replicating virus than the branches of a tree.”
David Goldberg
SMASH TV INC.
“I like to think of a business as something you can walk away from and it still makes money. If you can´ t walk away from it, it’s not a business, it’s an adventure”
Zane Vella Piazza virtuale, Cityspace and Service Area a.i. to name a few media experiments of the 90’s, were directly attempting to open up channels for artists and children to express themselves other than by industry, government and military controlled media channels (TV, high bandwidth 2 way networks), thus presenting an intermediary step between Public Access Television and the Internet. Mastering new technologies was a big part of creating these temporary virtual worlds and it showed. Communication on an interesting level (not so much in Cityspace) was virtually made impossible by using the right technology in the wrong medium (chat on TV, for example). The Beta Lounge, using widely available tools and technologies for unlimited and uncensored broadcasts at virtually no cost, was able to focus back on the content and proved the existence of a very agile and interested niche audience on a medium in which access and availability is inherent: the internet.
Since the dream of free expression, the dream of a chaotic, anarchic and self-organising network of the free has been turned back into a dream by the likes of AOL and its various “easy-to-use-if-you-do-exactly-whatwe- want” frontend packages, the task has slightly changed: Keep the internet accessible for people who have something to say. From the skillset available inside of the Network Syndicate and its various spin offs, predecessors and sidebranches like Internet Tours, The Jolly Roger, Infonauts and touchfist. com, the concept of Smash TV evolved. It was founded by Zane Vella, who is also a co-founder of the Beta Lounge, and is run at present by more or less the same team that initally started the Beta Lounge.
We believe that a network of nodes in which each node constantly talks to the network about supply and demand is not only more human but also more powerful as a business entity then a centralized system. Consequently Smash TV offers a variety of free software tools that help people to manage their content on the web at low cost and with a minimum of ground level technical expertise. Those tools were built with the technical experience of almost 8 years of doing live webcast and 6 years of social and artistic experience doing the beta lounge.We wanted anyone who could design a website or produce a digital video or audio clip to be able to upload their work themselves to the site. Our thought was that by making an easy-to-use interface, we could help save time and energy by not having to rely on Systems Administrators to upload new work, or make such changes to the website.
Zane Vella
THE BOTTOM LINE—BUILD IT YOURSELF The generation of our parents made a strict distinction between a job and a hobby, but for us those lines have blurred. If you can´ t find a job you like, you have to invent one and continue to adapt your day-to-day existence according to the demands of western capitalist culture. There's strength in numbers. The trick for us has been to inject the drive sparked by creative projects into our day-to-day “jobs" so that we can continue to evolve as a self-sustaining collective. We understand this as being an opportunity and a privilege, but most importantly a responsibility. Aside from what we do (music/webcast/education) we hope to be able to present a model for others to be encouraged. Build it yourself. If this sounds like activism, then so be it.
The Beta Lounge Team aka
The Network Syndicate aka Smash TV
The People / Reference
Ian Raikow, Zane Vella, Brian Benitez,
David Goldberg, Ole Lütjens, Chris Jurach ,
Susan Clark, Niels Bacher, Christian Wolff,
Jennifer Cole-Masset, Gil Barros, George Alambo,
Heiko Jahnke
Links:
www.betalounge.com
www.betalounge.de
www.smash.tv
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