Sun, Mar 10, 2002 page11

• New music options served up on cable

  TUNES Music Choice says it's the world's first digital audio service offered via satellite to cable TV subscribers

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  A jazz singer recently asked me, "How do you like all those new music channels on your TV?" I made puzzled noises, to which she happily replied that she had just subscribed to Time Warner Cable's digital service and was now receiving 40 music-only channels, each of which offered round-the-clock, commercial-free programming.

  I followed her lead a couple of weeks later and subsequently discovered that many New Yorkers -- including more than a few digital cable subscribers who had access to channels 601 through 640 but had never taken the time to find out what was on them -- were as unaware as I had been that they could use their television sets as cutting-edge radios.

  

  Liz Opoka, right, a senior manager of Music Choice, and Damon Williams, its programming director, in their Manhattan office. Subscribers to Time Warner Cable's digital cable have a range of music options on channels 601 through 640.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  Tune into a Time Warner music channel and you will see a sky-blue screen identifying the song that is playing, the name of the performer and the title and label of the CD from which the track is drawn. The sound is as good as the speakers through which you're hearing it, and the channels cover an unusually wide range of genres: top-40 hits, golden oldies, rap and metal, country and classical, easy listening, jazz, gospel, New Age, even an all-Tejano channel. No disc jockeys are heard, nor are there announcements of any kind. All you hear is music, 24 hours a day.

  And while I can't claim to be an authority on such niches as "For Kids Only" or "World Beat," I've been listening to a half-dozen of these music channels with some regularity, and I've been consistently impressed by the quality of the programming. "Singers and Standards," the school-of-Sinatra channel, seems a bit on the bland side, but the jazz and big-band channels are usually quite diverse in their fare, while the two classical channels (one features full-length works, the other shorter "drive time" classics) almost always have something good on. "American Originals" offers extended blocks of bluegrass, show tunes and Dixieland -- a nicely eclectic mix -- while "Post Country," perhaps the most interesting channel that I've listened to closely, specializes in the rough-hewn music of alt-country artists like Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and BR5-49.

  Having spent a few bemused months channel-surfing from genre to genre, it occurred to me to ask: Where was all this good music coming from? The name Music Choice is posted in the upper right-hand corner of each screen, but no other information is visible, and I had a sneaking feeling that I was plugged into a super-station located somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

  Famous for nothing

  In fact, a morninglong series of telephone calls eventually led me to the corporate headquarters of Music Choice, a company based in Horsham, Pennsylvania, a tiny township just north of Philadelphia. So far as I can tell from its municipal fact sheet on the Web, Horsham is famous for nothing in particular, but Music Choice, though you've probably never heard of it until now, may well be in the vanguard of a significant change in the way Americans listen to music.

  Founded in 1990, Music Choice bills itself as "the world's first digital audio service offered via satellite to cable television subscribers."

  A partnership among Microsoft, Motorola, Sony Corp of America, Warner Music Group, EMI Music and a half-dozen cable TV providers, including Time Warner Cable, it serves 1,050 cable systems across the US, reaching roughly 85 percent of the current digital-cable market. (The other 15 percent is served by a smaller competitor, DMX.) Music Choice claims to have more than 18 million audio customers, with an average listening time per household of 14 to 17 hours a week. Its 45 channels (New York subscribers do not receive "Folklorica," "Boleros," "International Love Songs," "Brazilian Pop" or "Brazilian Beat") are programmed by 10 different specialists, each of whom maintains a group of playlists much larger than those heard on ordinary terrestrial radio stations, most of which adhere rigidly to one of a half-dozen lowest-common-denominator formats carefully tailored to maximize market share. "Our current-hit channels play between 500 to 800 songs each," said Damon Williams, Music Choice's director of programming. "The oldies channels are bigger -- anywhere from a thousand to 2,000 songs."

  Liz Opoka, the company's senior manager for adult programming, previously worked as the music director of WFUV-FM, Fordham University's much-admired public radio station. Now she programs country, bluegrass and adult rock for Music Choice. "I get lots of e-mail from people thanking us for `Post Country,'" she said. "There's really nothing like it on mainstream radio. Our listeners mayread about artists like Nanci Griffith or Freakwater, but they can'thear them. It's a chance to get to know and appreciate a whole new kind of music."

  In fact, as public-radio refugees like Opoka know, many noncommercial radio stations are opting for less music of every kind, substituting popular national programs like "This American Life" and "Car Talk" for knowledgeable local DJs. Their disappearance has left music lovers high and dry -- and opened the way for Music Choice. "I did a lot of bluegrass and alt.country programming at WFUV," Opoka said. "Coming here has given me the opportunity to flesh out those formats."

  If this has a familiar ring, it's because you've been reading about it -- only in a different context. Satellite radio, which beams 100 channels of digital music and talk directly to your car for a modest monthly fee, is being touted as the next big thing. In order to hear XM Satellite Radio or Sirius Satellite Radio, though, you have to be driving a properly equipped vehicle.

  To date, there seems to be little interest in marketing satellite radio receivers for home use.

  Comparatively few New Yorkers drive to work (and fewer still make use of Internet-based radio sites, like Spinner.com). Most, though, have cable television, and digital cable, with its enhanced picture quality and larger number of channels, is catching on quickly -- it now reaches a half-million viewers in the greater New York area. As more subscribers discover the music channels now available on their television sets, Music Choice could become a major factor in the lives of frustrated listeners, in New York and elsewhere, who can no longer find a radio station that plays their favorite songs.

  Interactive plans

  For all its potential significance, Music Choice remains an essentially anonymous enterprise. But the company just opened a branch office in midtown Manhattan, and it is in the process of rolling out an interactive service that will be available to New Yorkers starting in April. "Not only will you see artist and song information on screen," Williams said, "but you'll also have access to album-cover artwork, artist bios and tour dates, and you'll be able to buy whatever CD you're listening to, just by using your remote control."

  This service is already in about 3 million households right now, and it'll jump to 10 million by the spring. That's the next stage for Music Choice. It'll make more people aware of us as a brand."

  At present, though, most people appear to be finding out about Music Choice as I did, by word of mouth, which is an oddly personal way to make the acquaintance of so anonymous a medium. Much of the historic appeal of postwar American radio was rooted in the strongly individual tastes of well-known on-air personalities who decided what records they would play -- and, just as important, what they would say about them.

  Can an announcerless cable channel possibly have the same career-enhancing effect on an unknown artist that Jonathan Schwartz had on the cabaret singer Nancy LaMott by playing her records, and talking about them with infectious enthusiasm, day after day on WQEW? I doubt it.

  But if, as seems increasingly apparent, the choice is to be between music without talk and no music at all -- especially when the music being played is so wide-ranging in genre and generally reliable in quality -- then I'll take my music straight, and be glad to get it.
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