Features
How 1995’s Macintosh NY Music Fest ‘Livestreamed’ 25 Years Ahead Of Its Time
(Photo courtesy Michael Dorf) –
Le Trail Blazers: Michael Dorf (left) and Andrew Rasiej at the Knitting Factory’s booth at 1995 Midem conference in Cannes, France promoting the Macintosh New York Music Fest at a time before livestreaming existed.
In 1995, long before iPhones, WiFi, social media or Zoom consumed our daily lives, there was just a couple of forward-thinking New York City club owners and promoters looking to replace revenue created by the collapse of the New Music Seminar the year before. Their ingenious idea: a hybrid music festival both in-person and “webcasted,” the livestreaming of its day, at clubs across the city. A brilliant idea to be sure; but like so much inspiration, timing is everything. And if this year’s livestreaming bonanza is any indication, the Macintosh New York Music Fest was just a quarter century ahead of its time.
“This year, some Manhattan clubs have banded together to create a new music gala, the Macintosh New York Music Festival,” The New York Times proclaimed just before the event’s launch. “It could be the first time that a rock festival is taking place simultaneously in clubs and on computer screens, with its own site on the Internet’s World Wide Web.”
“…with its own site on the Internet’s World Wide Web” – let that sink in. Even the language for this burgeoning technology about to envelop the planet had yet to be established. Few knew in the early-to-mid 90s the difference between a site, the Internet and/or the web. Sure, there was dial-up Internet through phone lines facilitated by providers like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, which had their own portals; but there was no Google dominating search (just Ask Jeeves…), social media (there were BBS or bulletin board systems like The WELL and SonicNet), browser options (Netscape seemed to dominate the market) and most glaring a high-speed computer in our front pockets (i.e. smartphones). Some of the artists who performed at Mac Fest, including Laurie Anderson and Todd Rundgren, had created interactive CD-ROMs, then considered cutting edge technology, but by today’s technological standards would seem quaint.
(Ebet Roberts/Redferns) –
Laurie Anderson performing at the Knitting Factory in New York City on July 19, 1995 during the first Macintosh New York Music Festival.
The Macintosh New York Music Festival, with little to no digital architecture, launched July 17-22, 1995 with some 350 bands playing at 15 venues and a strong lineup, booked by Walter “Worldwide” Durkacz who was the festival’s associate producer. the bill included: The Throwing Muses, The Boredoms, Jeff Buckley, Supergrass, Boss Hog, The Residents and Blonde Redhead among many others.
“Because of my prior experience in booking the week long festival for the then recently defunct New Music Seminar, the Mac Fest was pretty much business as usual for me in essence and intention,” Durkacz says. “While we were exploring new territory with our impossibly forward thinking idea to stream or webcast the festival concerts online to the whole web, I knew there would be issues with such an ambitious new concept and undertaking. So my focus remained to simply put interesting and creative packages of artists together in all the NYC clubs participating so that the public would attend and enjoy and thereby also make the clubs happy with successful nights.”
An all-you-could-eat pass cost $75. Also, unlike the Seminar, bands actually got paid a small honorarium, according to Dorf. The quality of the “webcasting” was primitive at best and the UX (“user experience”) pretty much predated online users and experiences – which didn’t make the concept any less groundbreaking.
It all began in 1995 with Michael Dorf who had owned and operated New York City’s awesomely underground and eclectic Knitting Factory since February 1987. He had just relocated from small digs on Houston Street to a tri-level emporium in TriBeCa. The roomier, 10,500 square foot space included a main stage (300 cap) with two smaller performance areas: a tap bar with craft beers and the smaller Alterknit Theater. On the bottom floor was an office and studio. A monthly nut of $10K for the new space combined with the loss of New Music Seminar revenues set Dorf in motion.
“Every summer the Seminar was just this key financial gold mine for all of the clubs,” says Dorf, who now owns and operates City Winery. “New York clubs are really tough during the summer. Every year for one week, a bunch of us wankers would go around club-to-club with badges and drink like fish. The talent never expected money because they were all showcasing. It was just a week of cash flow that was key. When I moved, it was February and I’m starting to anticipate the summer. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I have new rent and big bills and I don’t have a New Music Seminar.’ So, I’m like, ‘How hard would it be to just put a festival together, some industry thing, and we all just go around with badges? 50 bucks. You get a badge, you go around, and you drink.”
Dorf is something of a tech-minded early adapter and by 1995 had wired his new club for Internet and had long owned a DAT machine. A year earlier, in 1994, he purchased a new technology enabling him to “webcast,” which he hoped would help sell CDs on his Knitting Factory Works label. “It was a way to go direct to consumer, but it was so far from developed,” says Dorf, who looked to another industry for proof of concept.
“All of a sudden it was like, ‘Wow, the porno industry was jumping into something called ‘webcasting.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, we could do this with our shows.’ The first webcasting machine was called the Xing box. I found a contact and talked to the guy who was selling them. It was a plug-and-play IBM machine. It was like $3,000. You had to pay cash because he was selling them like hotcakes. It was like a drug deal. I met him Sunday morning because I needed Friday and Saturday night’s receipts. I gave him an envelope filled with cash. He gave me the box. No instructions, nothing. And we started webcasting.”“
(Photo by Rita Barros/Getty Images) –
New Kid On The Block: Michael Dorf stands outside his former club, The Knitting Factory which he opened on Houston Street in 1987 before moving to TriBeCa in 1995.
When asked about the first webcasted concert, Dorf doesn’t recall. “We just turned on the machine and it was just always on, so it ended up being nightly. I remember getting chewed out by John Zorn because he was doing rehearsals, and somebody caught a piece of it in that primitive way and saw Bill Frisell was a special guest. Zorn was so upset. It was a privacy issue. And he was totally right. I learned a lot from that.”
Dorf soon began reaching out to fellow club owners for their takes on his festival concept. “I called over to Wetlands and talked to Pete (Peter Shapiro), and go, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ and he’s like, ‘Why, of course.’ Then I call Andrew Rasiej at Irving Plaza. I was not friends with him but knew of him. I go to Andrew like, ‘Hey, I want to do this thing in July.’ And he goes, ‘Do you got a sponsor?’ And I’m like, ‘No.’ And he’s like, ‘Call me back when you have a sponsor.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay.’ A month later I called back. I convinced Apple Computer to give me $75,000 to do a festival.”
(Robin Platzer/Liaison) –
Andrew Rasiej, who partnered with Michael Dorf on Mac Fest, at the Big Picture Conference on April 3, 2001
“Of course I remember that conversation vividly,” says Andrew Rasiej who backed into the music business because he was in real estate and one of his clients owned this “old theater on Union Square they didn’t know what do to with.” That old theater, of course, was Irving Plaza (1,200 cap) which he took over in the early-90s as an industry outsider. Rasiej says he quickly learned the value of aligning with other clubs (including Steve Weitzman at Tramps, among others) to find synergies.
“When Michael called, I was like, ‘Nice to meet you.’ I was always looking to expand the value of the venue,” Rasiej says. “I knew the New Music Seminar was a money maker for everybody. If he could get something going then I was in. I agreed with the premise that we should reconstitute the New Music Seminar for the digital age, and I was at least savvy enough to know we couldn’t pull off an event like that unless you had sponsors. You had to have someone underwrite it.”
“John Sculley was running [Apple] into the ground at that point,” Dorf says. “They were at 2% market share. Actually, they were the little company that people thought was getting beat up. A guy named David Pakman, who I’m still friends with, got very involved. He was on the receiving end of that call, and he made the deal with me.”
“The whole thing was awesome, but it was all Andrew and Michael’s idea,” says Pakman who is both a computer science engineer and a drummer (his band Change was signed to Elektra) and is now a partner at Venrock, a firm specializing in investing in and building digital media companies. “I had co-founded a group at Apple called the Music Group. We were trying to do cool things with the music industry to show off Apple technology. I was based in New York at the time and the [pitch] came to me. I met with Andrew and Michael and they’re so compelling. They were like, ‘We want you to sponsor this thing and put your brand on it and we’re going to hold a festival.’ I went back and talked to my team, and we called them back up and said, ‘Okay. We will sponsor it, but we want to do something different. We want to put computers in every club and we want to try to stream it.’ And they were like, ‘That’s awesome.’ They were tech-forward, but we brought the horsepower, the computers, the people, and we helped wire the clubs up.”
(Photo by Noam Galai/Getty) –
David Pakman, formerly of Apple, now of Venrock, speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
In addition to Dorf, Rasiej and Pakman, the team also included Ted Werth, whose TotalNY was a sponsor, and Rob Glaser, who brought technology better optimized to webcast music. “I swapped my Xing machine for a Progressive Networks machine,” Dorf recalls. “And by the time the festival came along, he changed the name to RealNetworks and Real became another partner along with Apple and SonicNet.
“SonicNet, co-founded by Tim Nye in 1994, started out as “a bulletin board system just for music where people could log in and read about bands, music news, find out tour dates,” says Nicholas Butterworth, then the platform’s president. “We even had a rudimentary ticketing thing where we would basically print out a guest list and bring it over to Brownies and that’s how we sold tickets. We had chats with artists which you could do in a text-based medium. SonicNet was already booking artists mostly kind of underground, indie rock. We had Jim Carroll doing chats.”
Consider that next time you’re falling asleep during your next Clubhouse session: a text-based chat with no images, video or audio.
For Mac Fest, Butterworth says, SonicNet did all the editorial coverage. “We had a whole string of writers and a whole schedule and they would go cover the show and then try and file their copy by modem back to us. And if they were taking pictures, I seem to remember there wasn’t enough bandwidth to really upload all the pictures, so those we would have to run back to the office to upload them because there we had more bandwidth.”
(Photo by Steve Eichner/Getty Images) –
Eye of the Storm: Japan’s Boredoms, with lead singer Yamantaka Eye (center), performing at the first iteration of the live webcasted MacIntosh Music Festival in New York in July 1995.
By all accounts, the IRL shows in the clubs – which included Brownies, CBGBs, The Coney Island High, Cooler, Continental Divide, Fez, Irving Plaza, Knitting Factory, Tramps, Under Acme, Maxwell’s, The Mercury Lounge, SOBs and Wetlands – were great, but the digital webcasting aspect, not so much. The technology just hadn’t yet scaled despite the organizers’ bold vision. The stories they tell 25 years later, however, are awesome and often involve running around in a pick-up truck, re-wiring phone lines, fixing modems, staying up all night and generally having to MacGyver everything.
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An ad for the second annual Macintosh New York Music Festival from Spin magazine.
“Basically, with duct tape and elbow grease, we built this infrastructure that required us to deliver, install and then maintain all of this technology that was patched together throughout the city,” Rasiej recalls. “We didn’t get any help from the club owners. They let us in, but they didn’t know how to work the equipment. They didn’t install it in a permanent place. So, the bartender sees an extension cord sticking out and he needs to plug in a beer cooler and realizes, ‘Oh, what’s this thing?’ Unplugs it. Next thing you know the screen goes down or somebody trips over an extension cord and unplugs it, or the camera came off because the duct tape didn’t hold. We had a whole crew running around the city. I was driving my pickup truck, and people would be in the back and I would run to Arlene’s Grocery, drop somebody off to go fix something, and then I’d run or drive to the Bottom Line to fix something else.”
“I was in the back of Andrew’s pickup truck or Subaru Brat or whatever it was,” Pakman recalls. “But it had a bed in the back. And I was sitting in it while he was driving around and we had signage we were putting up at every club, that said the Macintosh New York Music Festival. We were running around all night long troubleshooting tech issues – a modem was out, or someone screwed up the configuration and it wasn’t logging on.”
“Literally, the first festival was founded on a 14.4 modem,” says Dorf. “It was broken up and herky-jerky. But it was really cool because we were able to get people from Europe and Asia who could somehow link in and find it. And when a single person from Singapore would get on the chat, it was just the coolest thing. It was like walkie talkies. ‘I hear what’s going on there live in New York.’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, cool!’”
The Mac Fest’s computer terminals were often situated in a venue’s lobby or foyer with small crowds gathered around them wanting to know what they were or to see the fest schedule and who was on at other clubs in real time. It made entering and exiting clubs more difficult. The Mac team kept watch over the $3,000 computers where SonicNet’s editorial personnel sat inputting show write-ups and photos which turned up on screen as ghostly static images.
“It was a clusterfuck,” says Marti Zimlin, a talent booker at SonicNet for six years who recalls writing up shows at a venue called The Grand in the East Village. “It was really loud, first of all, and it wasn’t set up very well to have computers in the lobby of the venue. It was kind of like you were seeing the band, but you couldn’t see them. And everyone wanted to know what you’re doing. It was kind of this cool new buzzy thing to check out.” Zimlin also noted some of the bars had to take the phone off the hook to use their dial-up. “You go to set up and they’d be like, ‘I’m not taking this phone off the hook. What if there’s an emergency?’”
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Cutting Edge for ’95: The interface from the 1995 Macintosh New York Music Festival showing livestreams from the Knitting Factory and Irving Plaza.
“We kind of ran before we could walk,” said Janet McQueeney, who worked in the Mac Fest offices doing everything. “I registered participants and was troubleshooting and riding my bike all over Manhattan,” she says. “No one even knew what a modem was. People were sitting in front of a computer being like ‘Is this thing even on?’ There was no network or highspeed internet. But the music was great.”
Pakman says things did improve after the first debacle of a day. “After the first night we were in the basement of the Knit and a bunch of stuff didn’t work, like people who are supposed to report to certain clubs didn’t show up, certain clubs were offline and there were a bunch of different parties involved,” he said. “There was Apple and our team, Nicholas Butterworth from SonicNet, Michael and his team and Andrew, it wasn’t clear what the lines of authority were. It was a kind of a free-for-all. That night I kind of stood up and filled the leadership vacuum. After we argued for an hour at 3:00 a.m. about everything that didn’t work, I was like, ‘Okay, let’s try it this way.’ And apparently, most people were like, ‘Okay, that’s cool.’ So, we stopped pointing fingers. And for the next few days, we had a method to our madness.”
The press, according to the festival’s publicist Michelle Ferguson of MFPR, was something of a feeding frenzy. “I worked with them on a ton of stuff,” she said, landing features in the New York Times, CNN, USA Today, Wired, Japan’s Yomiuri and elsewhere working alongside Nasty Little Man PR. “A lot of my job was trying to explain to people in the press and the industry just what the heck we were doing and how it fit into their world— a lot of it was starting from ground zero.”
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I Want My MTV: Kurt Loder reporting on the 1995 Macintosh New York Music Festival.
The fest also included the daytime Plug-In Festival with digital-focused panel discussions. “I remember the first conference the first day was at Cooper Union in New York,” says Dorf. “The panel was a record company panel I moderated. I opened the conference up, actually, with a shofar and blew it and said, ‘This is very symbolic. This is symbolic because it’s time to wake up. This was an early communication device and technology advanced communication very quickly. And that’s what’s happening here.’ My first question was to the record companies – and I had Mark Ghuneim from Columbia and Camille Hackney and all the label marketing people, many of whom segued into the digital world eventually. I asked, ‘Aren’t you guys afraid of going out of business?’ That was the opening of the festival.”
The Macintosh New York Music festival would continue for four more years, with rapidly improving technology and far greater sponsorship dollars. Jupiter Communications came in the second year along with 450 bands at 17 venues with the pass price dropping to $45. Apple was out by the third year and Intel came in and wrote out “a seven-figure check” for the third and fourth years. That first year with Intel some 100,000 users reportedly logged on. By then, the livestreaming genie was out of the bottle and the realization that livestreaming didn’t have to be confined to one week out of the year prompted Mac Fest’s partners and other to expand into livestreaming from venues.
In its fifth year, 1999, Dorf and Rasiej (who had sold Irving Plaza to SFX in 1997), renamed their online confab the Digital Club Festival which coincided with the launch of their new business, the Digital Club Network (DCN.com) co-founded with Werth as chief technologist and strategist. The business was built on the premise of livestreaming and recording performances with a number of wired clubs with the intention of over time building an archive. “We wouldn’t wire up just New York clubs, but we had wired clubs like Fox Theater in Boulder and First Avenue in Minneapolis,” Rasiej says. “The business was now 365 days a year of streaming from every club. We evolved from a one-time event to a digital music company that was the precursor to what we consider live music streaming today.”
(Courtesy Janet McQueeney) –
Walter Durkacz (left), who helped book Mac Fest, and Andrew Raseij.
Before these new media companies connected to the music business ever had a chance to scale, the rug was yanked out with the 2000 burst of Internet 1.0 Bubble. In January of that year, AOL acquired 55% of Time Warner for $182 billion in stock and debt. By March, the bubble’s air started leaking profusely as Yahoo and eBay canceled a merger; and over the course of one week in April, the NASDAQ Composite index lost a quarter of its value.
Dorf would end up leaving the Knitting Factory in early 2002 after venture capitalist and a “wealthy patron” took control over his company, according to his 2019 book “Indulge Your Senses, Scaling Intimacy in a Digital World,” which chronicles his businesses rise and fall with the Internet bubble, 9/11 and the 2008 recession, which is right when he launched City Winery. The wine and music venue business now has outposts in Nashville, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., The Hudson Valley, Boston and Philadelphia. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that City Winery Nashville, which hosted socially distanced shows along with live streaming platform Mandolin, was Pollstar’s top earning club in Q1 of 2021.
When asked about his takeaways from the Mac Fest and his experiences with livestreaming, Dorf says he remains an analog guy. “I still believe, the more music is consumed digitally, whether it’s through streaming or whether it’s in an elevator going up, or in whatever format, the more people want to go see music live. Ultimately, that was the whole point of my book, “Indulge Your Senses.” I believe the value, the preciousness of a live concert and the ability to get intimate, you just can’t do through a screen. You can do a lot of different things, and more than we ever realized, but it’s not the same. You can’t replace it. I’m reminded over, and over, and over that that’s not going away and, in fact, kind of my business model, my plan remains really solid: Put on a great show. That’s where the real value is.”
“Now, of course, there’s webcasts everywhere,” says Pakman, who went on to N2K, a digital music company formed by GRP’s Larry Rosen and Phil Ramone and then MPlay which sold to BMG. “A week after the conference, Apple formed a group called the Macintosh Music Network, and we wired four or five or six clubs around the United States permanently,” Pakman says. “We did live broadcasts every night from those clubs, and the technology got better and better.”
(Photo By Catrina Genovese/Getty) –
Nicholas Butterworth, former president of SonicNet and CEO of MTVi.
SonicNet would move offices to Broadway, complete with a basketball court and regular parties, which became something of party loci during the Internet boom. Butterworth helped broker SonicNet’s sale to Viacom, which formed MTVi and named him CEO. He’s now chief digital and technology officer for real estate investments at CBRE.
When asked about his takeaways, Rasiej – who works in philanthropy and social justice and is CEO and co-founder of Civic Hall, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and Chairman Emeritus of NY Tech Alliance – still thinks there’s lots of room for technology in the live space.
“It’s still mind-boggling to me that they haven’t figured out how to sell you a ticket to a concert and at the same time offer you a digital, edited version of the concert downloaded to your email as soon as the concert is over,” he says. “Like four years ago I went to see Beyoncé at MetLife Stadium. She had this monstrous screen that was so big that anywhere you sat it was like you were watching the concert live on television because the screen was so big that everybody could see it. There were basically 15 cameras live editing the concert in real-time for 50,000 people. When that was over, everybody would have paid, or I would have paid 25 to 50 dollars more to get everything that I saw through those cameras, but they didn’t sell to me.”
Pakman reflects, “Looking back on [Mac Fest], I don’t think that was super compelling as a consumer. It wasn’t like, ‘Woah. This is great. I’ll never leave my house again.’ But it was the beginning, right? And you could start to taste where online entertainment was going to go. It was definitely the birth of webcasting,” which would become, as we all now know, livestreaming.