This computes!

Stumpworld goes boldly into the electronic universe

by Jon Garelick

If there's anywhere the Do It Yourself mentality is flourishing, it's in the multimedia world of online technology. In fact, the history of cyber-technology is the stuff of DIY lore: Steve Jobs and friends inventing the Apple in their garage; two students creating the Web browser that eventually became Netscape. It's a technology that straddles the mainstream and alternative culture at once. As everyone is so fond of saying, the Net is a level playing field. And bands have been quick to discover it. A Morphine Web site is just as accessible, and as available in as many places, as Aerosmith's. If you're online, you automatically have worldwide distribution.

The result is that some of the most creative work in cyber-technology continues to flourish outside the mainstream -- not in the giant high-tech companies on Rte. 128 and in the Silicon Valley, but, for instance, in a shambling Victorian house in Allston, where multimedia company Stumpworld Systems, Inc. makes its home. Stumpworld's clients include everyone from Kenmore Square club the Rat to Sony Music. No surprise that most everyone who works at Stumpworld is a musician in a band.

"It's the same sensibility," says Stumpworld's 31-year-old president, Scott Matalon. "This work is attractive to the type of person who would stay up all night by himself practicing." Stumpworld employee and bass player (for Seks Bomba) Matt Silbert suggested to me that the mathematical intervals of the language of music are very compatible with the language of software development. Whatever the paradigm (and "paradigm" is a very popular word at Stumpworld), the company has attracted a half-dozen or so full-time employees who prattle on happily in that cheerful motormouth way that those of us with friends in the online world have come to know and love.

Stumpworld began two and a half years ago, when Matalon, a trombonist with a bachelor's degree in jazz from the New England Conservatory, decided to turn his day job into a business. An interest in computers led him to programming games, then accounting software, then a series of jobs that culminated with a position as MIS director for Boston Biomedical Consultants, which in turn was part of the pilot test group for commercial use of the Internet back in 1987-'88, before there was anything even known as the Web.

"Work got me more work, and that got me training, and before you know it, I was here," Matalon recalls. His roommate, and co-founding partner, Tim Halle, had similar experience -- working with bands and performance groups, co-founding Bird Dog recording studios, and at the same time becoming involved in an increasingly sophisticated series of audio-visual multimedia projects in the music business. His résumé includes work with theatrical former wunderkind Peter Sellars and a gig as lead projectionist with the extravagant multimedia U2 Zooropa tour. And if you ever saw the local performance-art/rock band the Archbishop's Enema Fetish a few years back, well, Halle was the Archbishop.

The Stumpworld offices don't even qualify as unassuming. In the converted living room on the first floor, seven or eight terminals are spread over unfinished wood tables or well-worn wooden office furniture. Band posters and homemade art adorn the walls. Stumpworld is in a constant state of remodeling; a second-floor bedroom has been converted into an audio-visual studio. There's nasty industrial-quality green carpeting underfoot, minimal furnishings, an old-style kitchen where you can find glasses in the sink or someone getting a haircut at the kitchen table. In short, it's a frat house for the cyber-afflicted.

"The New York office doesn't look like this," Matalon assures me. That's where Stumpworld VP of marketing and development Pamela Burton fronts the business for high-end clients like Sony and Capitol. Burton, co-founder of Frontier Booking International (FBI), used to represent a client list that included the Police, R.E.M., the Go-Go's, and Simple Minds.

Matalon and Halle, despite their scruffy hacker-like appearance and surroundings, are well-spoken, fluent in the language not only of the Net but of marketing and finance, of revenue models and vertical markets. The work that got Matalon more work and then training has served him well, and he's in demand as a speaker and panelist at online confabs. "Most creative types would rather work in a falling-down Victorian house where they can drink beer, and not go to Lotus," says Halle.

"Or some stupid I.M. Pei building with no room in it," adds Matalon.

The Stumpworld routine tends to kick in late in the day and continue into the night, with a break at 7 to watch (on Channel 56) the manna of every tech head, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the topics of discussion are not plot and character but computer graphic programs and the nature of time as propounded by Stephen Hawking ("I love Stephen Hawking," Matalon coos). With increased business, though, the Stumpworld day may be starting earlier. In the first quarter of '96, Stumpworld did more business than in all of '95. And Matalon and Halle allow that there's less and less room at Stumpworld, even on a part-time basis, for untrained help.

At this point, Stumpworld's client list is all over the map. On the one hand, Matalon works on his band Squid's Web site, and Stumpworld also takes on jobs from friends' bands. The company has also created and maintained a popular Web site for the locally produced magazine of literary erotica, Paramour. On the other hand, Stumpworld clients include Sony, Capitol Records (including their Blue Note and affiliated jazz subdivisions), Aerosmith, Phish, and Ben and Jerry's. Creating a Web site for a local band might cost $1000 or so, whereas the high-end client billing can get into six figures.

Stumpworld works at both ends of the spectrum. The Net has opened a whole new cost-effective marketing tool for baby rock bands. "Think just in terms of mailing lists," says Matalon. "A band goes out on a little regional tour, they collect mailing lists. E-mail is free. You can mail a million messages -- it's free. That's certainly a big difference from 16 cents apiece for bulk postage."

For bands signed to labels -- major or indie -- it offers another element of control. "Todd Rundgren has talked about how he can make his own promotional materials," says Matalon. "The record company doesn't have to invest in it, they can just link to him. That's a tremendous savings. Rather than sending his photo everywhere, it's on his Web site, and anyone who wants it can get it."

The control factor is important for bands moving to a major label. "I once talked to a band that had signed to a major and I asked them about the label's multimedia thing and they were all bummed out because this other company made the Web page. The band had no say in it. They were bumming -- big time -- because of the way they were represented. I know guys who quit bands because of the way the poster looks, for crying out loud."

No two Web sites necessarily serve the same goals. "Any kid in America can buy a U2 album," says Matalon, "so buying albums isn't what that Web site should be about. Those fans want to get closer to the band, so they want tour dates, band news, online chats with the band members." Blue Note, on the other hand, has a huge catalogue but limited distribution, so jazz fans will want catalogue and ordering information. And, because these guys know the discographical impulses of jazz fans, Stumpworld's Blue Note site includes all manner of cross-referenced links so that fans can get not only bios but lists of every Blue Note album on which, say, Chet Baker appears either as a leader or a band member.

Without specialists like Stumpworld, even the big labels can muck up online marketing efforts. When Tori Amos's most recent Atlantic album, Boys for Pele, was offered online weeks before its in-store availability, it bombed, reportedly selling fewer than 100 copies. This was an album that would go on to debut at #2 on the Billboard 200 top-albums chart.

You could write that off by saying that Amos's fans are mostly female and Net users are mostly male. "But when we went and looked through the Tori Amos newsgroups and went into the Tori Amos chat rooms," says Matalon, "what we found is that none of the Tori Amos fans knew about this. So just because you're on the Internet doesn't mean anyone knows anything about it."

"The point is," says Halle, "that we should have heard about it. And we didn't. So the marketing wasn't there."

On the other hand, when Phish, who have an enormous fan-newsletter mailing list, announced the creation of their Web site, they got immediate, tremendous response. "We had 100,000 hits the first day. That's an example of someone whose Net demographic is right there. You don't have to work for it at all."

At the other end of the spectrum is Paramour, which has a newsstand and subscription distribution of 15,000 but is getting a few hundred thousand hits a month online. And this is where the use of the Net as a marketing tool is just beginning to be explored: its ability to track an audience. With its emphasis on erotica, Paramour expected heavy late-evening traffic. "The site, which has adult content, was getting its majority of hits on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons between one and five," says Matalon. "So it's not people at home, it's people at work. There's a real dip at around dinner time through the evening TV hour, and then from about 10:30 it gets really popular again, and then after 1 it's dead."

Skillfully used, Web sites can extract a plethora of information from a potential market -- age, hobbies, buying habits. The basic measuring stick of Web-site activity -- how much it's accessed -- is just the beginning. The traditional market-research tools of the print media -- focus groups, reader questionnaires -- pale in comparison. It's similar to the revolutionary data with which Soundscan transformed the Billboard charts in tracking albums sales.

"If you take out an ad in Paramour, I'm going to suggest you take it out on the special-features page," says Matalon, "because that's the most-used page. I can tell you by the day of the week, by the hour, how many people saw your ad. No other media can tell you that." The more involved a user becomes in a Web site, the more questions he answers in return for entering contests, buying T-shirts and albums, the more information he provides.

"Give us some demographics about yourself and we'll give you something cool to do. That's a pretty standard model," says Matalon. "If a kid online tells me that he's a heavy metal fan but I'm getting a lot of hits per day from him in hip-hop, then I know more about him than he does."

The Stumpworld home page can be found at http://www.stumpworld.com/.