March 10, 2000

Danny Goldberg’s Artemis Records recently hooked up with Net music company myplay.com in an effort to take the buzz on the emerging baby band Kittie into cyberspace. The Kittie project provided myplay with an early opportunity to shake down its Target Music Marketing program (or TMM in acronym-happy Netspeak), an online marketing approach the company is pitching to labels.

Myplay based its direct marketing Kittie promotion on the targeting of users based on the company’s growing database, which includes the specific music stored in users’ virtual lockers, their stated preferences and their listening habits. The company offered "Brackish," Kittie’s first single, as a free digital download way back in October. Additionally, the track was offered to all new myplay members in its initial e-mail to them.

As Artemis and myplay had hoped, traffic on the Kittie website, relaunched Jan. 14, increased significantly. According to myplay, the Kittie site has generated 2.4 million hits, 472,059 page views and 47,000 sessions since that time.

For those as baffled about these stats as we are, here's the story, according to a myplay spokesman: When a viewer enters a page, a "hit" is automatically registered on every clickable item on that page. A "page view" is just that. And one "session" is logged for one or more visits to a site during a 24-hour period.

We do know that "Brackish" has been myplay’s number-one-added track for 21 weeks. The company gave the 8 percent of its users who put "Brackish" in their lockers the option to add the track "Choke" as well, and nearly 20 percent of them did so. This highly targeted group was then prompted to purchase the album at Amazon.com. Myplay also ran co-branded spots featuring the band and Artemis on late-night TV and in Billboard. So why are we giving these ingrates coverage in HITS? Simple: We're hoping for some stock options.

"We believe there is nothing more exciting than making a contribution to breaking a new artist," said myplay Sr. VP Business Development David Pakman . "By communicating directly with fans, we're able to create highly efficient marketing campaigns based on their individual preferences. We think Kittie rocks!" Pakman added, earnestly flicking his Bic and attempting to make the devil sign.

By the way, myplay.com describes itself as a "popular, legal and industry-supported Web-based music service," as opposed to all those unpopular, illegal, industry-shunned music sites.