Then again, maybe the Web is the answer. Showbiz types are guarding the castle walls as closely as ever, but a couple of dot.com start-ups might help you sneak in over cyberspace. In February, Universal Music Group will launch FarmClub.com, the industry’s first record label rooted on the Internet. FarmClub will pin its future on a new way of finding talent: garage noodlers will send music in electronically. “This is what record companies of tomorrow are going to look like,” says Jimmy Iovine, head of Universal-owned Interscope/Geffen/A&M, who will serve as FarmClub’s CEO. The film world is keeping pace. In January, a New York-based Web developer will launch GoodStory.com, essentially an eBay for movie scripts. For a small fee, GoodStory will take your work and post a summary of it on the site. Founder Mark Patricof, 35, a six-year veteran of talent titan Creative Artists Agency, will supply the industry eyes. “We’re just putting buyers and sellers together,” Patricof says. “It’s like creating a flea market.”
More like a junkyard, say folks who make daily decisions about talent. If a site like GoodStory charges writers even a dime to peddle their material, says one big-league producer, “it’s always a ripoff.” As for FarmClub, one A&R man at a major label calls it “just a glorified way of getting demo tapes. Maybe this is their way of preventing other labels from getting crappy music.” ScriptShark, an active site similar to GoodStory, receives a lot of material from Hollywood’s “slush pile”–writing that’s already been rejected or was simply never read. But maybe the experts missed something, says ScriptShark CEO Ed Kashiba. “There may be a grocery-store bag boy out there who’s a great writer and just doesn’t have the right access.”
Jamie Bussin, 33, has a slightly better job–he’s a lawyer in Toronto–but he still skipped the normal channels for fear that his script would be ignored. “If you’re sending out a bunch, that can get expensive. Not to mention frustrating,” Bussin says. So he sent “The Housesitters” to ScriptShark. The Web site wasn’t crazy about it, but it liked his writing. Last month Bussin began hammering out a deal with a C-list firm, Major Clients Agency. He won’t be thanking the Academy any time soon, but he’s convinced the Internet got him farther than he would’ve with a stamped envelope.
FarmClub has the corporate muscle to craft its success stories in-house. Each week it’ll showcase a few of its infant acts on a one-hour TV show after the USA Network’s highly rated “WWF Raw.” The sweetheart deal comes courtesy of Seagram’s, which owns Universal and USA. If FarmClub takes off, it might be more of a triumph for vertical integration than for the Internet. But what do you care? You’ve got a demo to record.
