Club Cafe To Spotlight Small-Venue Performances

By Michael Machosky, Tribune-Review

For Pittsburgh’s live music scene, the end of The World — the club, that is — was a bad sign.

Then the Rock Club closed its doors, joining long-gone stalwarts Club Laga, the Beehive, the Decade, and the beloved Graffiti.

But the survivors aren’t giving in yet. Club Cafe — a small, 150-person venue on the South Side — is doing the opposite. It’s launching a plan to expand its reach that’s so ambitious and original, it’s hard to find anything to compare it to.

“Live at Club Cafe” will debut Saturday night on UPN Pittsburgh, showcasing intimate performances from up-and-coming national touring artists. The show will build upon the venue’s reputation for adventurous programming — everything from outlaw country to singer/songwriters to alternative rock — and package it as a TV show that anyone in the station’s 15-county coverage area from Maryland and West Virginia up to Venango County can check out before Saturday Night Live.

“This isn’t just a new idea — the club was built with this in mind,” says Marco Cardamone, co-founder of Club Cafe and Merging Media, which is co-producing the show with UPN Pittsburgh. “We knew it was a very small club …. Part of our goal is that we don’t want to bring the world to Club Cafe — we want to bring Club Cafe to the world.

“So we really bought the club with the idea that we’d capture on video the magic that happens in a small venue, where you get an artist and audience in close proximity,” he says.

Chris Pike, vice president and general manager of KDKA and UPN Pittsburgh, says “We know we’re sort of breaking new ground for music in Pittsburgh.”

Future episodes will feature Chuck Prophet, Shivaree, and Holmes Brothers — all regulars on WYEP, for which Cardamone is on the board of directors. They might try to expand the repertoire and there may also be a local music segment eventually.

The performances featured on the show are live, but the “Live at Club Cafe” episodes are edited ahead of time into 30-minute shows.

Pittsburgh itself is also featured inside and outside Club Cafe.

“Part of our agenda is to shine a spotlight on how cool Pittsburgh is,” says Cardamone. “Not through our eyes … But what we’ve found in the past five years is that we’ve had some of the coolest artists stand on that stage and say, ‘We couldn’t find our way down here, the roads are so weird, and then coming through the tunnels, it’s like — Whoah, what a city!’

“We’re looking at this as much more than a local TV show — we want to put Pittsburgh on the map.”

Personality also comes into play. “We’ve discovered over the past five years is that there’s a lot of really cool music going on right now,” says Cardamone. “But because of the way the industry is structured, it’s really hard for you to know about it. MTV and VH1 don’t even show videos anymore.”

Looking for interesting music turned up a bunch of really interesting people. The first performer featured on the first show is Paul Thorn, a singer/songwriter from Tupelo, Miss., — who used to be a skydiver and a boxer.

“The show the show is in large part about getting to know the person behind the music,” says Mara McFalls, who hosts “Live at Club Cafe.”

“Paul shines in the interview,” she says. “He talks about how he grew up as a Pentecostal minister’s son — with fire and snakes and passing out in the aisle. He was never allowed to go see a concert. The first concert he was ever allowed to go to was when he opened for Sting.”

“I think people are hungry to hear the backstory,” she says. “Where these people came from, what motivates them, their sense of humor — can you relate to their experience? Once you get to know them a little better, it’s like, ‘Dude, I can’t wait to check out your music!’”

McFalls, a tall, striking brunette with just the right balance of professional polish and rock and roll style, is an interesting personality herself. She’s originally from Pittsburgh, but worked for dot-coms in San Francisco, before deciding to get into TV.

“When I was leaving San Francisco, people were like, ‘You should really go to L.A. if you want to get into TV and film,’” says McFalls. “I was like, ‘No, I think I’ll go to Pittsburgh and give it a shot.’”

And here I am co-hosting a show in Pittsburgh, and still get to have lunch with my mom and hang out with my sister. You don’t hear enough of those stories about young people in Pittsburgh.”

The title sponsor for “Live at Club Cafe” is Comcast, who will archive each show after it airs on UPN, for access via their On-Demand digital cable service, with extended performances, interviews and extras.

The dream, ultimately, is to go national.

“It’s been a couple of years of crawling across broken glass to get to this point,” says Cardamone. “Small club, big dream, basically.”

February 17, 2005

The Building Of A DVD:
Janis Ian Taping Session Shows How Video And Sound Come Together

By John Hayes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In her soft, trademark coo, contemporary folk singer Janis Ian again purged her personal demons as she sang her high-school expose “At Seventeen.” The intimate crowd sat stone silent, jolted by the impact of a statement as raw and powerful as it was the day it was so self-consciously released in the 1970s.But just upstairs at the South Side’s Club Cafe, the mood was harried and technical. Two producers and their aides huddled over consoles, adjusting sound levels, commenting on varied images of the ongoing concert flickering across nine television monitors, directing through audio headsets the operators of hand-held TV cameras and reacting to problems that the entranced crowd never noticed.
The simultaneous scenes were like left and right brain perceptions of the same moment. The date was June 15, 2004, and the occasion was the first of two performances that would be captured on a DVD recorded live at Club Cafe.

From the day dot-com millionaire Marco Cardamone and his partners bought the former jazz club, it was intended to be more than a food and beverage vendor, more than a place for 125 people at a time to see a concert. Cardamone envisions a day soon to come when the emerging field of music DVDs dominates the music business. The discs can contain all the music of a traditional album, still and moving archive images, backstage interviews, biographies, discographies, artist trivia … just about anything the producers want to include.

With home DVD systems now the fastest growing form of home entertainment, Cardamone built Club Cafe to be a high-tech recording studio disguised as an upscale music showcase. A mile away on the South Side, his Merging Media company provides the post-production and marketing support that he hopes will one day make “Live at Club Cafe” a familiar moniker. The goal is to attract top stars to Pittsburgh to record their DVDs. The deals will vary with each artist, but in general and unlike traditional record company deals, Cardamone wants to split the profits down the middle.

To test the process, last year Merging Media released a DVD with nationally recognized Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Bill Deasy. The “Live at Club Cafe” brand also appeared on DVDs by Jill Sobule and Adrian Belew and the Bears.

Last spring, Ian performed at Club Cafe and learned about the room’s technical capabilities. She cut a deal with Cardamone and returned in June to make the DVD. Unlike Merging Media’s previous releases, the Ian project is a work for hire, not a 50-50 split, with Ian marketing it herself.

Preparing For The Best

In June, Ian fans from Pittsburgh and beyond were invited to reserve seats for two nights of recording. There was no cover charge and the taping was closed the general public. Audio producer Barney Lee and video producer Clay Kisker had spent weeks preparing for the shoot. In addition to the club’s wall- and ceiling-mounted video cameras and microphones, remote camera operators were hired, and the small stage was adorned with a simple, classy set.

Two hours before the first show, Ian, dressed down in black T-shirt, sat at a cabaret table to talk.

“I have an international audience, particularly in Europe and Japan,” she said. “In other countries, especially Japan, they expect a certain technological quality from a DVD, and if you can’t provide it, that reflects on the level of your career. They think you’re on the way down.”

Cardamone had impressed her with Club Cafe’s mission.

“They showed me their other DVDs, and the quality was top notch,” she said. “I mean really. We talked about it, and this is costing me less than it would somewhere else, and the work is just as good or better. I love the intimacy of the room, it’s really very nice, and Pittsburgh is always a very good audience for me. This is the perfect place for me to do this.”

Perhaps because of the intensely personal, confessional nature of her songs, Ian has an intensely loyal following. Fans traveled from across the country — a few came from Ireland — to be a part of the DVD.

A half hour before the show, Cardamone welcomed the crowd and issued a few instructions. Act naturally, he advised, when the camera passes. Anyone waving or staring at the camera would be edited out. Unnecessary noise should, of course, be avoided, and the crowd got a heads-up that there would be two encores.

“And if you want to give a standing ovation for ‘At Seventeen,’ ” he said, “that’s a perfectly natural thing to happen.”

Ian and her black electric-acoustic six-string took the stage solo to predictably huge applause and launched into two songs in quick succession. While part of her appeal comes from her between-song crowd banter and stories setting up the songs, she explained that these shows would be different.

“Please don’t talk to me unless I talk to you first,” she cautioned the crowd, “and don’t call out your favorite song. I promise I’ll get to it. You can expect a little more time between songs, more time for tuning and technical things. Because I’m gonna have to live with this [DVD] for the next 20 years, and unlike some of my earlier albums, which I wish I would have fixed, we want to do this right.”

Two songs into the unusual concert, she told the same story twice, trying to get the timing right, chuckling casually afterward. The crowd seemed understandably tense and rigid until she loosened them up with a rousing take on “Paris in Your Eyes.” She winced when she muffed a chord in the bridge but quickly moved on to the next song.

The cooperative crowd stood to applaud for “At Seventeen,” a perfectly natural thing to happen. After an encore, she came out again to play “Love Is Blind.”

“When you get this [DVD],” she said, “it won’t be the encore. It wasn’t big in the States, but it’s a big hit in Japan. So we’re gonna dub it in.”

Second Chance

The next evening, some of the same faces showed up among the reservation-only crowd. Cardamone gave the same pre-show speech, adding a request that they avoid sitting in the same seats they had the night before to prevent production paradoxes such as panning past the same person twice and catching him in a different shirt. This shoot included an extra complication — it was simulcast live on WYEP (91.3 FM). Before the performance, program director Rosemary Welsch interviewed Ian for the DVD’s bonus tracks.

Dressed in a different blouse and pants, Ian began the second show with “At Seventeen.” Welsch interviewed her, for the second time in hours, on stage for the radio broadcast, a part of the concert that would not be part of the DVD.

Upstairs in the dimly lighted control room, with the scent of candles burning in a candelabra, Lee and Kisker had their hands full. That afternoon, they and Ian had mapped out some of the songs and stories they wanted a second crack at recording. Kisker worked the joysticks that operate the mounted cameras, panning for aesthetic effect and zooming in on Ian’s underrated fret-board work and beaming smile. The tiny room seemed bigger on camera.

“After looking at what we got last night, there are a few key places that we want to revisit,” he said. “It was a good show, but it’s mostly about timing — getting the right expression on her at the right time from the right angle, getting the crowd reaction just right, getting a take with her voice and guitar just right.”

“It’s a little different for me,” said Lee, riding the audio controls. “There are two — really three — sound systems tonight. Her monitor and the room sound are being mixed by her sound man. We have a parallel feed coming up here that I’m mixing for the DVD, plus there’s a feed going to ‘YEP, which they’re monitoring. It’s just her and a guitar, but she’s so effects-heavy. Look at her levels,” he said, pointing to a row of lights on his sound board. “She’s singing really quiet now, but in a minute she’s gonna hit an effects pedal and this line is gonna spike. I have to know what’s coming and ride it so we don’t …”

He stopped, lost in his work.

Downstairs, Ian touched a button that turned her lilting acoustic guitar sound into a symphony of electronic modification while pulling back from the microphone and wailing at the top of her voice.

When she got to her second attempt at “Paris in Your Eyes,” Ian muffed the chord again, triggering a resounding buzz. Her voice cracked.

Watching the video monitor behind Kisker, Cardamone cringed.

The song didn’t make the cut. It’s not on the DVD.

“I’ve always had an affinity for Pittsburgh,” Ian tells the crowd. “When I was 14, I wrote this song about an interracial romance and, at first, nobody would play it. [Radio in] Pittsburgh, Manhattan and Flint, Mich., were the only towns to play it for its first six months.”

The audience applauded in anticipation of “Society’s Child.”

Something in her mood, in the moment she’d crafted with the crowd, or maybe in her frustration over muffing an earlier song — whatever it was, it exploded when Ian launched into the tricky guitar work of “On the Other Side” while her voice sizzled with the passion of the moment.

Upstairs, Lee concentrated on the wildly fluctuating sound levels. Kisker zoomed in on fingers flying up the neck of her guitar. Ian absolutely nailed it — even the crowd knew that something unusual had happened and roared.

“Awesome!” shouted Cardamone. “Did you get that? Did you get that?” The whole crew stood to congratulate each other.

During a short break between sets, Ian rushed upstairs.

“I’m certainly glad we got that on tape,” she said, “because I’ll never be able to sing it that well again.”

Final Product

The next day, Ian and the Merging Media crew reviewed the footage. Odd angles — flowers growing out of her head, an unflattering glimpse up the star’s nose — were deleted, and the best takes were chosen.

For weeks afterward, Lee and Kisker blended scenes and mixed the music. At the very end of a beautiful version of “Stars,” someone had dropped a handful of change on the floor. The jingle had been picked up by one of the microphones. Lee edited the accident out of the show.

Ian sent Merging Media a digital archive of photos from her family collection, images dating back to when she was a precocious 14-year-old with a hit single. The photos were compiled in a touching slide-show bonus track.

By September, the smartly produced 31*2-hour DVD was finished. Ian had hundreds shipped to Europe, where she was touring. Officially released in November, it sells for $15.95 at janisian.com and amazon.com. Ever the businesswoman, Ian negotiated an agreement to market the DVD in Japan and is said to be working on a U.S. deal that would put it in stores.

Bob Petts of the National Educational Telecommunications Association says the DVD has aired on 57 public television stations across America, reaching about 35 percent of the country. Curiously, it did not air on Pittsburgh public television.

“Part of public television’s mission is to bring diverse arts and sciences to viewers,” says Petts, “and Janis Ian fits perfectly into that. As far as I’m concerned, this is a very good DVD. The video is crisp and clean, the audio is spectacular and it’s an extremely faithful presentation of a Janis Ian concert. What you see on the DVD is what you see in concert.”

Cardamone, absorbed now in Merging Media’s next project, a local TV show, says his company benefitted more than financially from working with Ian.

“She’s a fantastic professional. She understands her art and exactly how she wanted to present herself,” he said. “She had a clear vision of what she wanted to do. It really was a great experience for us, and I think we learned a lot from working with her.”

The Bears Are Back – At Least On DVD

By Ricky Bird, The Cincinnati Post

The video starts outside the Club Café. It’s February in Pittsburgh. For fans of The Bears it might as well be heaven.

We see a few fans letting out little bear growls each raising one hand as a paw. Cut to back stage and the band members mimic the gesture.

Then it’s on to 20 live songs filmed at the club for some of the best power pop one will ever hear from a group that hasn’t played together in 14 years.

This week The Bears are releasing a real treat for fans, a live concert DVD, “The Bears Live At Club Café”, complete with interviews with the four band members and a tour of Northern Kentucky native Adrian Belew’s home studio in Nashville.

The DVD, excellently recorded in surround sound, plays as a Bears’ greatest hits package and will be a familiars et list to those who saw the band at its two gigs at the Southgate House in 2002.

There are old Bears favorites like “Trust” and “Superboy” with newer material like Belew’s ode to ‘60’s garage bands on “117 Valley Drive” and Fetters’ heart-wrenching “Dave” about a boyhood friend who committed suicide. On the video, fans are seen with tears in their eyes hearing the song.

The Bears formed in the mid–‘80s when Raisin Band members Rob Fetters, Bob Nyswonger and Chris Arduser hooked up with Belew, Northern Kentucky’s most famous rock star, who played with everyone from Frank Zappa to King Crimson. After two well received albums the band went on hiatus in 1988 not to reform until releasing “Car Caught Fire” in 2001. It was like they never left, giving us another great package of solid pop writing with guitar heroes Belew and Fetters as sharp as ever.

The Club Café is a tiny 100-seat venue run by a group of Pittsburgh music lovers who have equipped the space with video cameras and a studio, making a DVD an immensely easier and cheaper project for bands. (Cincinnati blues-rocker Kelly Richey earlier this year also released a DVD recorded at the club.)

For the Cincinnati band members (Fetters, Nyswonger, Arduser), putting out a DVD is a new experience even though they are all veteran players.

“It’s definitely frightening to look at yourself that long. I stopped mirror-gazing in my early teens,” Fetters said with a laugh. “But I thought they did a great job. We were lucky because they were big Bears’ fans and the fact that we are not world famous didn’t mean anything to them. They just wanted a band that could play live.

“Fans will love the interview sessions with Fetters, Nyswonger and Arduser, who grew up in the Toledo area, telling stories of being raised on Detroit rock like Iggy Pop, MC5and Ted Nugent. Belew shows off his guitars and talks about how Fetters and he developed their playing styles. Above all, the DVD refreshingly treats the four players as equals in the group as songwriters and musicians, even though, Fetters admits, Belew is the internationally recognized star.

“Adrian is the star for people from without looking in. And we are aware of that,” Fetters said. “Inside the band, it’s a cool group. The fame thing doesn’t have any bearing on how we treat each other.

“Best of all, the DVD shows they guys smiling, smirking and grinning throughout the set. They almost look like they are getting away with something illegal to be having this much fun.

“We are happy,” Fetters says emphatically, “because we just feel lucky we still get to do this.

“Yes, there will be a new Bears album and this time fans won’t have to wait 14 years. Fetters said the group has finished recording six songs, working once a month or so at Belew’s Nashville studio. He thinks the album could be done by fall and the band is exploring ways to launch an extensive tour this year that may take them to the West Coast, something they didn’t do when they reunited for shows in 2002.

The biggest holdup for such touring is for the four to free time from their day jobs: Belew continues his collaboration with King Crimson; Fetters is a producer at Cincinnati’s Sound Images; Arduser plays in several local groups including the BlueBirds and with Brian Lovely; and Nyswonger is a local real estate agent also in the band Bucket.

“The Bears Live At ClubCafé” DVD is available in Cincinnati only at Everybody’s Records, Pleasant Ridge, or through the band’s web site, www.thebearsmusic.com.

Rock This Town
By Stephen H. Segal, Pittsburgh Magazine

Her absurdly cute, tear drop shaped acoustic guitar in hand, Jill Sobule walks across East Carson Street from the CD store Dave’s Music Mine to Club Café, where she’s playing a gig that evening. A handful of dedicated fans is already lined up in front of the closed front door, “I had a hit once!” she greets them, and pulls herself up inches from one admirer’s face to start hammering away at the guitar. All present try not to laugh at the sight of the diminutive singer-songwriter shouting, “I kissed a girl!”—the title lyric to her ‘90s MTV hit, famous at the time for its tongue-in-cheek video starring beefcake model Fabio—directly into the startled fan’s ear.

Club Café’s high-tech renovations finally bear fruit:
Its first two national DVD concert releases.

 That’s the kind of unexpected moment frequently captured on Sobule’s new live-concert DVD filmed last year at Club Café and produced by the club’s sister company, Merging Media. The Dec. 19 release of Club Café Presents: Jill Sobule marked the fruition of a plan that started four years ago, when four internet and music entrepreneurs — Marco Cardamone, Barney Lee, Clay Kisker and Dennis Loughran—purchased the former jazz club and refitted it with an array of high-end audio and video recording technology with and eye to developing live-music products for the digital era. “Over the past few years,” says Cardamone, “we’ve recorded over 140 shows” in the process of exploring the club’s multimedia capabilities; Sobule’s disc, the first such recording to be released commercially, will initially be distributed online via the artist’s and the club’s websites, but Cardamone expects a distribution deal with an established national label in the near future.

It wasn’t so long ago — 2000 — that Merging Media released its very first disc: not a Club Café live recording but a studio CD project, veteran Pittsburgh songwriter Karl Mullen’s debut solo album, Mercy Me With Curses. That collaboration let to Mullen’s subsequent tenure as Club Café’s concert promoter, which saw the venue flourish as a site for national cult-favorite touring acts such as Brooklyn based Sobule — who’s a one-hit wonder to the mainstream pop radio industry but a perennial favorite on more eclectic, adult oriented stations like Pittsburgh’s WYEP. “Jill was between record labels,” Cardamone says, recalling the surprise he initially received upon telling people Merging Media had signed a national artist to a recording project. “She really likes the club, she really likes Pittsburgh—so she said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”

January is expected to see the release of Merging Media’s second concert DVD, starring progressive-rock guitarist Adrian Belew (sometime of King Crimson) and his band The Bears; details will be available at www.clubcafelive.com.

By Tim Schooley

On a darkened conference room wall, a visual medley of musicians passes by — an edited video parade of pop.

With two DVDs by his side, Marco Cardamone watches the musicians — Norah Jones, John Mayer, Craig David and Duncan Sheik, among others — with more than just a sense of nostalgia for having hosted each of them at some point at his Club Cafe on the South Side.

As the president and CEO of Merging Media Inc. which is also based on the South Side and affiliated with the club, he believes he’s also looking at a major new source of business — for his company and for the entire music industry.

“I think it’s a whole new trend. I think it’s maybe going to be the salvation of the recording industry,” said Mr. Cardamone, referring to his DVD-based concert videos.

It’s a big claim for someone leading a relatively small company. But Mr. Cardamone’s optimism stems from the upcoming release of the first concert DVDs to be marketed under Merging Media’s Club Cafe Live label.

In what could be a major boost for the fledgling label, Merging Media has landed agreements from two national recording artists, singer songwriter Jill Sobule and Adrian Belew and the Bears. Both artists will release their first live concert DVDs under the Club Cafe Live imprint, after performing at the club in recent years.

While both artists are niche performers, they’re also well-known and critically respected. Jill Sobule may still be best known for her mid-90′s hit song, “I Kissed A Girl,” but has also recorded critically acclaimed albums on major labels such as Atlantic and MCA. A legend within music industry circles, Adrian Belew has performed with such artists as Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads.

Currently, Merging Media is in talks with Cambridge, Mass.-based Rounder Records, a well-known independent music label, that distributes it’s mix of CDs and DVDs throughout North America through industry giant Universal.

Paul Foley, GM of Rounder, acknowledged that his company is “very interested” in handling and distributing Merging Media’s Club Cafe Live CD series.

“We have made a strong move into the DVD market in the last year and half,” said Mr. Foley. “We believe that’s an area where we see real growth.”

How was Merging Media, with a brand- new DVD label and no history of producing and promoting a music product on a national basis, able to sign artists such as Mr. Belew and Ms. Sobule?

“Neither of them were on record labels,” said Mr. Cardamone. “So it was easier dealing directly with the artist.”

Also, the music industry as a whole continues in a state of major transition: The major record labels continue to consolidate; profits are harder to come by; and musicians are left with more technological choices to produce and promote themselves.

As the New York-based agent of Ms.Sobule, Jack Leitenberg saw the decision to release a DVD of her live performance at the Club Cafe as an easy one.

“Anything that will help get my artist or an act to a wider audience has to be explored — especially for someone like Jill who has a niche audience,” said Mr. Leitenberg. “These guys seem to have a setup at the club and are making it a really first-class facility. To me, it’s a no-brainer. If they’re playing there, why not do something and see how it comes out?”

The DVDs technically are a higher quality product than the concert videos of the 1980s. At the same time, Merging Media’s production costs are much lower because of the scale of the technology and the size of the club.

Mr. Cardamone has been positioning his young multimedia company to benefit from the rapid changes in the music industry for some time — even if he hasn’t always known which opportunities to pursue the most.

An Internet entrepreneur, Mr. Cardamone reaped $65 million in a stock deal by selling his company Electronic Images to USWeb, which was later renamed marchFirst. After buying himself out of marchFirst, Mr. Cardamone launched Merging Media in 2000.

As a showcase for the company, he and his staff turned the longtime Club Cafe nearby, which he had recently purchased, into a state-of-the-art recording studio. At the club, performers could not only play in an intimate setting to crowds of little more than 100 people, they could have their performances digitally recorded for both music and video.

While the initial plan to capitalize on the company’s ability to Webcast those performances fizzled in the wake of the dot-com bust, Mr. Cardamone compiled a catalog of 160 live performances.

Mr. Cardamone said he is in discussion with another 10 artists, which he wouldn’t name, for DVD releases.

Featuring a casual yet posh ambience, strong acoustics, and plenty of high-tech digital recording options, the club’s capabilities draw the kinds of national performers who might otherwise opt for a larger venue.

“I love the Club Cafe. I think that’s a wonderful place to play,” said Mr. Belew, who tours worldwide and resides in Nashville. “I like it because it’s intimate.”

Meanwhile, the music industry continues to grind through a technology-inspired identity crisis, with companies large and small still working to find a way to profit from the downloading of music via the Internet.

The changes have often left even performers such as Mr. Belew, who has also played with such music stars as David Bowie and Paul Simon when he’s not playing with his own band, looking for new answers.

While he has produced several albums with his band, the Bears, they no longer reach a sales benchmark large enough to attract the interest of major labels.

Mr. Belew describes a music industry in which major labels aren’t interested and can’t make money on any act that can’t sell at least 500,000 copies.

“We’re in the D.I.Y. category of people trying to figure this out themselves,” said Mr. Belew. “In the music business right now, record labels are all but extinct.”

To adapt, he believes musicians need to find partners best able to understand the new opportunities.

For him, Merging Media met that test.

“We liked their ideas. We liked their offer,” said Mr. Belew. “This is all new territory for the most part. The music biz is changing quickly and you need to find allies and work with them. These guys are good people and we had a good feeling about them.”

What gives Mr. Cardamone a good feeling are the gaudy growth statistics experienced by DVD sales in recent years.

He’s quick to quote the oft-said factoid that DVD technology has been the fastest- growing consumer electronics device ever. Indeed, industry stats back him up.

While DVD players were only introduced for sale to consumers in 1997, DVDs are now played in more than 48 million households in the United States. According to trade publication Video Business, consumers spent $4.8 billion buying DVDs in the first half of 2003 alone.

Since sales of music CDs have fallen, Mr. Cardamone’s argument goes, why not sell music played in concert on DVDs — a quickly growing market — instead? Mr. Cardamone says his new DVDs will sell for about $20 a pop, however he didn’t have any potential overall revenue estimate.

To make a profit, Mr. Cardamone said Merging Media — which will sell its Club Cafe Live DVDs directly through its own Web site as it negotiates distribution rights — only needs to sell as many as 10,000 copies.

Those numbers and the ability to reach a niche audience are what Rounder’s Mr. Foley finds appealing. Rounder’s selection of musicians perform in genres of blues, folk, country and rock.

“Rounder’s has been successful at recording releases of artists that the majors can’t make money releasing or aren’t interested in releasing,” said Mr. Foley. “We’re interested in this deal because we know how to make that economy of scale work.”

With Rounder having recently started offering its first music DVDs, including what he said was the industry’s first two-sided DVD to play music on one side and video on the other, Mr. Foley expects it to be a major growth segment.

He estimates that DVD sales will become 25 percent to 50 percent of Rounder’s sales in the future.

“The industry is waking up to the fact that consumers do view music video as a good added value,” he said.

While both of Club Cafe Live’s first releases are established artists, Mr. Foley sees great potential in helping to use Merging Media concert DVDs to help break new artists.

“I think the novelty there is going to be that you get in and see an artist in the early stage of their career,” he said of Club Cafe. “It will be such a cool presentation. There’s a lot of artists who want to go back and play smaller clubs.”

“We’re like the guinea pig on this thing,” said Mr. Leitenberg, the New York agent. “We’re willing to grow with them on this.”

Mr. Belew echoed the thought while admitting he has no idea what to expect from the first DVD release for the Bears on Club Cafe Live.

“They’re ready to rock,” he said of Merging Media. “It’s an unknown territory and nobody knows. That’s kind of what excites me about it.”

MR. SCHOOLEY may be contacted at tschooley@bizjournals.com.

March 1, 2002

Doing What You Love:
Marco Cardamone Talks About His Wild Ride On The Tech Boom Of The Late 90′s, His Passion For Music And More

MARCO CARDAMONE President & CEO, Merging Media, Inc. EDUCATION: Bachelor of Science in Communications, Film and Broadcasting Major, Boston University, 1977 BORN: Mt. Lebanon LIVES IN: Mt. Washington

How did you get involved in new media?

In the early to mid- ’70s, I was studying communications at Boston University. My focus was on film and broadcasting. At that time, I went to a seminar at Harvard about computers and art, basically a professor talking about the fact that computers might someday be able to do some of the things that artists do. I started attending different lectures. My interest in film started focusing on animation. I went to another really interesting seminar about how computers were using mathematical algorithms to create 3D objects and animation in an area called scientific simulation, at that time almost exclusively a Defense Department domain application. That was the pivotal point for me. I decided then that I was going to focus my time and energy in the nascent and emerging field of computer animation.

That was a different thing back then, right?

Yea. I remember a guy showing a slide of a wire frame model of a cube, and thinking, “This is amazing.” It ultimately led me to a place at MIT called the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). I then became a CAVS research fellow at MIT. The purpose of CAVS was to bring artists, scientists and engineers together in a collaborative environment to see what would happen. After that, I wanted to continue working in computer animation, so I left Boston and went to New York City and was fortunate enough to get a job at the only place doing that kind of stuff, Dolphin Productions, the first commercial computer animation facility in the U.S.

What brought you back to Pittsburgh?

By the mid-eighties, New York had actually become a really dark city. There were homeless people everywhere to the point where you’d literally have to step over them. All the excess and the economic decline really caught up with the city and it became really depressing. My wife-to-be and I decided that it was time to leave and try another city. We returned to Pittsburgh and started a company called Electronic Images on the South Side.

How did you hook-up with USWeb?

They first hit my radar in mid-1996 when I saw an advertisement in a trade magazine. Later that year Joe Stafura, my partner at the time, made contact with their business development guy. In January of 1997, we visited their Silicon Valley office to see what they were about. Their vision was to be the first company to build a national network of Internet professional services firms. If your company met their criteria, you could buy a franchise from them for $50,000.

But you weren’t really interested in buying in?

I was really looking for a strategic investment partner, not just the idea of paying someone to hang a logo on our door. But I knew that if they saw our operation first-hand, took our skills and applied them to their business model, that we’d become an asset. When we finished our presentation to USWeb’s Joe Firmage in our offices a week later, he became very excited about our capabilities, so much so that he started clapping wildly and enthusiastically. Instead of telling him we were going to become a franchisee though, I essentially asked him to invest $3 million in our company. He settled down quickly and in a very intense style and serious tone of voice told us that we’d caught him at a good time. His board had just voted to switch the business model from a franchise plan to an acquisition plan. Essentially he told us that USWeb was beginning an aggressive acquisition program to quickly scale their business in preparation for an IPO. We began formal discussions that evening at my family restaurant on the South Side (Café Allegro), and closed the deal six months later on July 1, 2000. It was the largest Internet deal in Pittsburgh at the time, valued at over $65 million. But it was an all-stock transaction.

So it was a huge risk, wasn’t it?

Yes and no. We made the deal on the assumption that USWeb was eventually going to go public and the stock would turn into real money…someday. And because it was pre-IPO, the valuation was very high. That helped attenuate the risk. On December 5, 1997, USWeb completed a successful IPO. We got in at exactly the right time. The Internet exploded soon thereafter.

What’s your new focus at Merging Media?

Our core focus now at Merging Media is really exciting. We’re in the process of developing a music education product with a gentleman who has invented a very unique music learning methodology. He presents music theory in a way that allows anyone to truly learn how to understand AND play music (particularly the piano and guitar) in a really short period of time. We believe we have something that can be quite broad if we execute our vision appropriately. We’re repackaging this system into a comprehensive multimedia DVD series, and we’ll deliver this product to the world through a direct-response marketing channel…Merging Media is both a business and an artistic experiment. There are things we do for love and things we do for money. We’re trying to converge the two.

Pittsburgh Magazine
Club Cafe Owners Seek To Plug Local Music Into Internet Audience

Hip To The World

By Christine H. O’Toole

Photography By Blaine Stiger

“We love what we do. Just plain love it,” says Barney Lee, a co-owner of South Side’s Club Cafe with Marco Cardamone.

That might be expected of a former rocker with 20 guitars to his name — and a musician who’s still writing and performing songs with wife Paula Cardamone. But this pair are also savvy business partners who nurtured a local media firm into a worldwide Internet enterprise and have returned to the music scene with a vision to bring local live performance to a worldwide audience.

In the quiet block where Bedford Square mutes the bustle of East Carson Street, Club Cafe’s funky neon sign has glowed unchanged for the past 50 years. But in its latest incarnation, the tiny club defines itself as “an Internet wired nightclub and content creation environment.” It’s a ’60s coffeehouse fast-forwarded to the millennium, with martinis, good food (from Cafe Allegro, a Cardamone project across 12th Street) and a cyber-vibe.

The renovated club opened in its new incarnation in September 1999, after being shuttered for two years. Cushy banquettes and small tables flank a sparkling bar on the first floor. Patrons might never notice the remote control, low-light robotic cameras that perch above the halogen lights and steel ceiling, quietly feeding a state-of-the-art digital recording facility on the second floor. This is one way that Cardamone and Lee have married their business interests and avocation.

After they sold their first firm, Electronic Images, to USWeb (now Marchfirst, a global leader in Internet professional services) in 1997, Cardamone and Lee traveled to its offices worldwide.

“We rode the crest of that wave, learned about the whole world and the Internet,” recalls Lee. “Then we started to talk about doing our own thing, where our passions are, and we got a core group of people and rebuilt Merging Media,” continues Lee, executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Still housed in Terminal Way, where the duo first joined forces in the late ’80s, the firm (with co-founders Dennis Loughran, CFO, and Clay Kiser, executive vice president of digital media content) focuses on digital media services in the music and entertainment field. Club Cafe, says Cardamone, is the main content-creation component of that overall vision.

“We had a very good idea of what a great venue would be. We kept it small and intimate,” Lee explains. But the half-million dollar investment in digital technology allows them to “grab things at a very high level, digitally” without detracting from the club’s cozy feel. Ceiling-mounted cameras are robotically controlled from a control center upstairs, where the performance can be mixed for recordings — allowing for crowd noise to be controlled for the final product.

Once captured, the distribution possibilities for those performances are boundless. Paul Simon playing live to 100 lucky fans? You’d catch it online, or on radio or TV, file it for screen later, or play it on DVD.

“We’re bringing Club Cafe to the world, not the world to Club Cafe,” explains Cardamone.

Thanks to the owners’ Internet credentials and investment, Club Cafe is positioned to share performances on its starry little stage with the world. But as they see it, the technology exists to serve the community, both artists and music lovers.

Locally, that means a wide embrace of Pittsburgh acts, from raucous Irish fiddling (The Wild Geese), rockers like Too Tall Jones, blues guitarists, singer-songwriters, poetry readings and performance art. The Club also hosts a steady stream of national acts, like Dave Edmunds, Janis Ian, Christine Lavin, Alex Chilton, Dexter Freebish, Robert Randolph, John Mayer, and Dave Carter & Tracey Grammer among others.

“We’re exposing Pittsburgh artist to national artists,” explains Karl Mullen. The intense, Dublin-born creator of the Karl Mullen Band (formerly Ploughman’s Lunch) handles bookings for the club in addition to his packed performing schedule.

“It’s not here today, gone today,” he explains of the Club’s diverse six-night-a-week lineup. “It’s artists who have something to say.”

“We have the stage, the forum for musicians,” Cardamone agrees. “People want to sing as much as we want to listen.”

Music has been a passion for Cardamone and wife Paula since they were “playing for sushi in sushi bars” 20 years ago in Manhattan. The pair met at Dolphin Studios, a New York computer-animation pioneer beginning to explore entertainment applications. Lee also has musical roots, including stints in various bands, plus time behind the sound board, producing a large number of local bands, including The Clarks, Joe Grushecky, the Corbin-Hanner Band, Bill Deasy and Billy Price.

The soft-spoken Cardamone sees no disconnect between the club and the family’s restaurant business. “It’s a different transport — here food, there music,” he explains over dinner at Allegro. And he takes fatherly pride in the young Allegro staffers who perform at and promote the club. Performance painter Kevin Wenner hosts at Allegro, and Sean Enright, a graphic artist, creates club playbills as well as waiting on tables at the restaurant.

The South Side collaboration among Merging Media, Cafe Allegro, WYEP-FM (which has broadcast live performances from the club) and local musicians is “the little ecosystem within the larger ecosystem,” says Cardamone.

During a raucous CD release party, Wild Geese bass player Jason Nash paused off-stage to praise Club Cafe’s ambience. “It’s arguably the best venue in town, for the sound system and sound quality,” he notes. Out-of-towners are taking note, too. Karl Mullen reports that Philadelphia Phil Roy left his first gig at the Club and e-mailed “everyone he knew” to rave about the place.

“The artists who play here carry the word to others,” says Mullen. “What’s been surprising is that artists I’ve booked elsewhere tend to give a different kind of performance here — it’s that intimate. It lets the artist open up.”

Opening up to a global audience is the Club’s “ultimate goal,” says Lee. He envisions a “Pittsburgh City Limits,” similar to the Austin-based PBS show, with club performances streamed via the Internet and television.

As broadband capabilities and DVDs become as common as TVs in American households, suburban stay-at-homes or downtown workaholics who can’t get out every night will eventually be able to share the Club Cafe experience through webcasts — an extension of its musical community.

“We know that, inevitably, broadband will be a reality,” says Lee. He admits to being frustrated with the technology’s slower-than-expected adoption. “It will take a little longer, but by the time it’s ready, we will have amassed an incredible catalog.”

Boomers “have a special place for music in their lives,” Cardamone says.

For him and Lee, both of whom graduated from Mount Lebanon High School in the ’70s, the kick of the club is less financial than spiritual.

“To hear a musician praise us — to know that not only do they appreciate it, but that they let everyone they know that we’re truly passionate about what we’re doing — that’s the reward.”

February 18th, 2001

Local Music Shines In Talent Gap
Bands Pour Some Sugar On Sour Scene

By Regis Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

One only has to look at the album charts to sense there’s something strange afoot in the rock ‘n’ roll arena. The Beatles’ “1″ has been No. 1 on most charts since mid-November, a sign that the timeless quality of the Fab Four endures.

Yet the mere presence of The Beatles on the charts – after all, it’s been 30 years since they were performing together as a foursome – is a sign that there’s a sizable talent vacuum in rock ‘n’ roll.

And that’s a problem for concert promoters.

“We would like to increase our business by at least 15 percent,” said Rich Engler, CEO and president of DiCesare Engler/SFX Entertainment. “But that becomes real difficult because of the lack of talent our industry is actually producing. It’s not coming up with many new acts other than this wave of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, The Backstreet Boys and N Sync.”

Marco Cardamone, CEO of Merging Media, a next-generation independent music label and entertainment company based in the South Side, agrees.

“If you’re looking at the music industry, it’s in a state of turmoil and flux unlike any other time in history, and that’s not going to go away,” he said. “There’s this huge fragmentation and emphasis on very young artists. … And within all that, there’s a very short half-life for new acts. Even if you get a new act and they hit superstar status, there’s no guarantee that they will become like those old acts that had much more staying power.”

Engler and Cardamone are on opposite ends of the local concert spectrum. Engler books acts such as The Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews and Bruce Springsteen into the area’s largest venues. In contrast, Cardamone’s organization books esoteric acts, such as The Willard Grant Conspiracy and John Doe, into the 100-seat Club Cafe in the South Side.

In between, there are venues such as Rosebud in the Strip District and Club Laga in Oakland that can accommodate between 600 and 1,000 customers. But there’s no real showcase venue in the area – like the former Syria Mosque and the Stanley Theater – that caters to the rock ‘n’ roll crowd.

That means promoters here often follow a national trend of packaging together groups by genre. The strategy started with Lollapalozza in the early 1990s, and since then, similar vehicles such as Lilith Fair and the Vans Warped Tour have been successful at bundling musically similar artists.

“If you put two or three decent classic rock bands together, or two or three up-and-coming alternative bands together, package it and price it right, that seems to stand out from the rest of the so-called normal fair,” said Lance Jones, executive director of SFX.

Despite a perceived talent gap nationally, there does seem to be an increasing number of gifted local performers, a combination of familiar and new faces. Engler is optimistic about prospects for veteran rocker B.E. Taylor, whose Christmas shows have sold out Heinz Hall the past three years. Karl Mullen, a musician who books bands for Sports Rock Entertainment at Rosebud and Metropol (recently rechristened M) and is the first artist on the Merging Media record label, cited Crisis Car, New Invisible Joy, Rusted Root’s Liz Berlin and The Boxsteps as performers who have developed regional as well as local followings.

Better than that, Mullen said, is the new spirit of cooperation among local musicians and audiences.

“Among the bands, it’s no longer `What can I get out of this?’ And there’s not only a scene and a community among the artists, but also a community of people who go out and see all these bands,” Mullen said. “There’s a sense now that there’s a Pittsburgh audience for diverse types of music.”

One of Merging Media’s missions is to promote local talent. Mullen’s “Mercy Me With Curses” was Merging Media’s first release, and Cardamone anticipates a slow-but-steady approach in developing local talent via The Club Cafe and new technologies that include state-of-the-art recording facilities and live broadcasting of events via the Internet.

“I think we’re trying to discover how to connect new artists to new audiences in new ways, and build a viable and alternative marketing and promotion business in the process,” Cardamone said. “I think that’s our biggest challenge and focus and opportunity.”

Despite a lack of new groups that have the star power of the legendary rock bands, Engler is cautiously optimistic about prospects for 2001 even as the economy seems to be slowing down.

“I think people have now cut back just like they did over the holidays, and spending is down,” he said. “But we consider our business to be a cheap thrill. People might not buy the new car or go on vacation or buy a new refrigerator, but to see Don Henley for an evening, that’s pretty much a cheap thrill, and doesn’t affect our business.”

February 20th, 2001

If You Miss That Club Act, Maybe It’ll Be On The Web
By Adrian McCoy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Imagine going to see a band or performer who usually packs arenas in a small, intimate club setting with top-notch sound and sight lines. This economically unfeasible booking is possible because the show is being Webcast live to the rest of the planet.Or maybe you want to see a band, but can’t find a baby sitter, or it’s a week night, or you just don’t feel like going out. So you watch it on the cozy confines of your computer monitor. Or you can catch an archived version later.

Say hello to the future of live entertainment.

And it’s in the not-so-distant future, if you gaze into the Merging Media crystal ball. The local multimedia company/independent music label has wired the Club Cafe to be a kind of virtual nightclub.

Merging Media CEO Marco Cardamone and executive vice president Bernard Lee, who also are co-owners in the Club Cafe venture, envision “Club Cafe Live” on the Web as a showcase that extends far beyond its four-wall boundaries. And they plan to use Merging Media’s audio and video production facilities to record and promote new talent, giving the company a presence in a reinvented music industry.

Club Cafe books a diverse array of national and local acts, from jazz to singer/songwriters, and rock to blues. It holds a little more than 100 people. But Cardamone and Lee are banking on the live Webcasts to expand that capacity many times over. It makes the idea of booking someone like a Bruce Springsteen for a solo performance in front of a small crowd sound a little less wacky.

Club Cafe’s charming deco facade and classic nightclub interior belie the high-tech brains behind the Webcasts. A fiber-optic curtain behind the stage adds an illusion of depth for the video images. The cameras were designed to work under poor lighting conditions, so the club doesn’t have to lose its ambiance during recording.

Club audiences are as fascinated by the cutting-edge audio and video recording technologies on the second floor as they are by the live shows downstairs. The club will be putting in windows so onlookers can peek in while the recording is going on. The second floor houses a full-blown recording facility. Four remote-controlled cameras are trained on the club, and two more hand-held cameras give them a total of six sets of images to mix and play with. All told, equipment expenses ran in excess of $250,000.

The resulting picture is not the static, low-quality Webcam video image most of us are used to seeing — after waiting a lifetime or two for it to download. The final product will be more like watching a live TV broadcast from the club. The result can be produced into a slick “Austin City Limits” kind of Web video package, which can be streamed live over the Web or archived for viewing on demand, Lee says.

Technologically, everything’s in place. They could start doing it tonight, except that most people are still hooking up to the Web by modem. It takes the broadband capabilities and speed of DSL or cable to quickly download high-quality video images of the performances.

They estimate it will be 18 months to two years before there’s a wide enough audience for this kind of Web programming. Letting the audience catch up on this technological curve is well worth the wait, Cardamone says. “The experience has to be good [for the viewer]. You’re only going to get one shot.”

Meanwhile, they’re recording and stockpiling audio and video of some of the national and local acts that perform there. Already in the can are performances by several local performers, including Bill Deasy, Karl Mullen, Too Tall Jones, Margolit and the Liquitones and New Invisible Joy.

The next national act to be recorded will be today’s concert by Absolute Ensemble, a group that fuses classical and contemporary music and instrumentation

Future possibilities for Club Cafe Live include enabling Web users to manipulate the cameras themselves and create their own views of the show, or to send e-mail messages to people in the audience.

As Lee puts it, “The Web is a very interesting playground for us.”

The club also is planning to do live remote broadcasts with radio stations. Last weekend marked the first foray, with a live simulcast of John Mayer’s performance on WXDX-FM. Lee says he was happy with the results. “It went great. It sounded amazing.”

There are two distinct audiences for “Club Cafe Live.” One is the young, club-going audience interested in new, original music. The second is the older, Baby Boom audience, who may be tied up on weeknights or unable to get out as much. Most of the college-age audience is already connected to broadband, and increasing numbers of home users are making the switch.

In addition to producing Web-based entertainment, Merging Media also is poising itself to be part of the rapidly changing recording industry. They recorded and released the latest Karl Mullen CD — “Mercy Me With Curses.” As an alternative to record companies or self-production, they believe they can offer recording artists everything a label can — from recording and promotion, including video and/or live DVDs recorded at performances.

The company also owns Insider Radio, which produces the syndicated “Internet Insider” radio show, which airs here on KDKA-AM. That talk show, or others, could someday be heard and seen on the Web.

The principals in this venture bring a unique combination of prior experience to it. Cardamone was the owner of Electronic Images, a digital communications company, which he sold to USWeb. Lee was the owner of Aircraft Recording Studios, which has recorded many local bands.

In many ways, the time for a “next-generation entertainment company,” as Merging Media describes itself, is right. With the Napster controversy and other changes, the recording industry “is going through a sea change,” Cardamone says, “Where there’s chaos, there’s opportunity. We saw the opportunity with the Internet to deliver art directly to an audience.”

Just as the compact disc revolutionized the recording industry in the ’80s, the same thing will happen soon with Web DVD and digital distribution, he says.

The company is proceeding cautiously after the demise of many Web enterprises and the “dot bomb” fallout of the past year. But, as Lee puts it, “The Internet is not going to go away.”

Cardamone acknowledges that his company is taking an “extraordinary” risk. “It makes us very careful with our resources.”
But when the future finally gets here, they’ll be ready for it.

The Next Wave
Venture Poised To Be Future Of Music Industry
By Regis Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Three years ago, Marco Cardamone struck gold, Information Age-style, when he sold his digital communications company, Electronic Images, to USWeb in a $65 million stock deal.

A fortune in hand, he could have done nothing at all, living the good life after years of hard work building his Internet enterprise.  Instead, the Mt. Lebanon, Allegheny County, native and his business partner, Barney Lee, are trying to forge a new prototype in the music business, a medium that is laden with hazards. Merging Media Inc. is described as a “next-generation, independent music label and entertainment company.”

“There’s opportunity in this town, it’s all over the place,” says Lee, who previously owned Aircraft Recording Studios in Dormont. “And what we hope to do is organize that and channel it in some unconventional ways, get it out there in what we feel is the music industry of the future.”

Merging Media’s components start with The Club Cafe on the South Side of Pittsburgh, at what Cardamone calls the “brick and mortar” level, where musicians perform live shows. The other segments are:

A traditional music distribution outlet, via CDs and cassettes;

Distribution of music via the Internet of recordings and live performances that can be downloaded via MP3 or digital format, or purchased as CDs or videos.

An eventual expansion to live Web casts via streaming audio and video of shows from The Club Cafe.

“The music industry is moving from a product-based to a service-based model,” says Cardamone at the company’s sprawling headquarters in the Terminal Buildings on the South Side. “We’re in a huge sea change – a transformation in that industry.”
Cardamone and Lee think they have a grasp of what the next wave will bring. Both music lovers and musicians, their approach is one of cautious optimism, spurred by a shared belief that the climate in Pittsburgh is ripe for their venture.

The plan seems to be a fantastic enterprise. The initial public impression – one Cardamone himself has heard – is that Merging Media is nothing more than a couple of guys with money to burn frivolously, a toy, if you will, for high-tech geeks.

“Well, I don’t think we have lots of money,” Cardamone says, smiling. “But that’s not the issue. The issue is, it doesn’t matter how much money we have. We’re out to make a business of this, or not. This will stand as a business. It’s not a vanity play for a bunch of rich guys. It’s not guys who love music and are going to dump a bunch of dough on it.”

However they are perceived, it’s evident Cardamone and Lee are guys with vision, experience and financial wherewithal. If Merging Media fails to reach its goal of becoming a profitable business – and both men acknowledge the venture could fail – it won’t be for a lack of effort and knowledge.

THE CONCEPTION
Cardamone and Lee both were born in Mt. Lebanon, but didn’t meet until the mid-1980s, when Cardamone moved back to the area after living in New York City for 10 years. With his wife, Paula, he sought a studio to produce a musical project. After a couple of meetings that didn’t pan out, he ended up at Lee’s facility in Dormont.

“We got locked in and recognized the similarities in not only our background and being from Mt. Lebanon, but with a lot of the music,” Lee says. “Just our philosophies in general about life.”

Behind the glass at Aircraft, Lee produced 35 albums, working with an A-list of Pittsburgh bands and musicians including Corbin/Hanner, The Clarks, Bill Deasy, Joe Grushecky, Billy Price and Shari Richards. Many of the artists also did voice work in national commercials he produced.

But working with Cardamone and his wife provided Lee with a link to other ventures. For Electronic Images, he began doing audio work for conventions and commercials for Cardamone’s business clients. Together, they built a state-of-the-art studio at the firm’s 40,000-square-foot offices at the Terminal Buildings.

Now, Cardamone and Lee have combined their love of music with business. They think Pittsburgh is underserved or ignored by national record and distribution companies, despite roots that extend back to Stephen Foster and jazz legends such as Art Blakey and Errol Garner.

“One of the questions everyone asks is why Pittsburgh as opposed to L.A. or New York or Nashville,” Cardamone says. “The answer is, there’s some incredible talent here. Our sense is that talent doesn’t know any geography.”

EMERGENCE
Merging Media kept a low profile until recently, when it released Karl Mullen’s album, “Mercy Me With Curses.” Although the company seemed to arise overnight, more than two years were spent researching and developing the concept of a music provider with a multi-channel, multi-product approach.

“We found lots and lots of people trying to take that artist-to-audience approach,” Cardamone says. “Some of them being artists themselves just trying to leverage the Internet, some of them being people who dropped out of the traditional music industry and started their own Internet companies. We found pieces of what we are doing, but no one who had all the pieces.”

Don Marinelli, co-director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, says the concept in spirit reminds him of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s legendary promoters.

“It’s as if Bill Graham, when he was alive, if you were able to tune in via the Internet to one of his shows at the Fillmore East or West,” Marinelli says. “Then you get a CD of the concert you’ve just seen with an extremely fast turnaround, or see the performance from the comfort of your home or while you’re on vacation or on business in Seattle.”

One of the important things Merging Media is doing, he says, is creating new content that takes advantage of the Internet’s capabilities.

Lawrence Eakin, technology director of investment research for Rockhaven Asset Management, a Pittsburgh-based mutual fund boutique, says Merging Media’s concept is solid as a balanced business model. However, many Internet companies are offering music or music-based products via the Web. If the company wants to thrive as an Internet-based provider of content, he thinks Merging Media will have to be savvy and partner with an established Web presence.

“Yahoo! was a firm that first developed a cult following, then grew larger, but it’s hard to do that on your own,” Eakin says. “If they can do that, then perhaps partner with a big media company to attract people to their site, they have a chance at succeeding.”

THE ART OF MUSIC
Karl Mullen has been a musician in Pittsburgh for almost 25 years. During that time he’s heard schemes and marketing plans from sundry types of music promoters. What attracted him to Merging Media was different than the usual sales pitch of dollar signs and glorious promises.

“Anybody can have capital. They have capital and smarts,” Mullen says of Cardamone and Lee. “It’s the smarts that are most attractive to us, because capital comes and goes. Those guys have a vision, and they’ve been successful in virtually everything they’ve done. I don’t see them not being successful in this venture either.”

For Mullen’s album, Merging Media spared no expense, hiring noted Irish producer Kevin Moloney, who previously worked with U2, Sinead O’Connor and The Chieftains. Moloney, who was in town two weeks ago for the launch of “Mercy Me With Curses,” says he was attracted to the project in part by Merging Media’s commitment and integrity of vision even as Cardamone and Lee made it clear they are interested in making a profit.

“They’re not trying to commercialize the music by turning it into Velveeta cheese or something,” Moloney says. “They want to keep everything as an original, organic product, not blurring all the edges, trying to make everything silky and glossy. They will be behind the artists as a driving force, and won’t try to change them or lead them into a different marketplace they shouldn’t be in.”

Mullen’s debut effort, Moloney’s presence and the recent media attention Merging Media has attracted have not gone unnoticed. Cardamone and Lee have been deluged with tapes and inquiries from local musicians and bands. Everyone, it seems, wants to hop on board.

But Cardamone, although flattered by the attention and interest, says the company will stick to its intended model of slow-but-steady artist development and growth.

“There is the art of music, which is the thing that attracts all of us to music. And then there is the commerce of music,” Cardamone says, “which has to do with marketing and selling of music. … You need both to build a successful music media and entertainment company. I like to refer to it as a-commerce as opposed to e-commerce.”

FULL HOUSE
On a recent Friday night, The Club Cafe was packed to capacity for a show featuring musician John Doe, formerly of the seminal punk band X. During his performance, Doe expressed his gratitude and surprise to the audience for attending, noting that he wasn’t sure what kind of response he’d get playing a solo acoustic show.

It’s a scene that Cardamone and Lee undoubtedly envisioned when they began their dream more than two years ago: a full house, a grateful performer, and an evening of invigorating entertainment. Because of the cutting-edge recording and broadcasting facilities at The Club Cafe, they’ve been able to book performers such as Doe and Jules Shear. Other national acts, they say, also are interested.

But the next piece of the Merging Media puzzle – the Webcasting of live events – might take awhile, perhaps 18 months, until it becomes a regular feature.

“We want to move quietly because we’ve watched a lot of people take live performances and stream them to the Web, and they’ve been pretty bad experiences,” Cardamone says. “Some people think it’s great to get crazy publicity around a bad experience, but we want to do this the right way.”

The market, Cardamone adds, is not yet ready for this advancement, with high-bandwidth DSLs and cable modem access having not quite reached market-level saturation. Merging Media, he says, is content to wait until the right moment, then seize the opportunity.

He and Lee, Cardamone notes, have been in this situation before with Electronic Images. It’s as simple as that old Kenny Rogers song, “The Gambler”: “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em.” The Internet’s bubble has burst, collapsed and new Web ventures will undoubtedly be more problematic.

“We were a part of a very huge, cresting curve, and we just got out in time,” says Lee, referring to the sale of Electronic Images.

Now, with the Internet tide at low ebb, success for Merging Media might just have to be measured one wave and one band at a time.

When I Become Tomorrow…

Analog Song Meets Digital Savvy As Karl Mullen’s Lush New Record Launches Tech Entrepreneur Marco Cardamone’s Lush New Record Label

By Stephen H. Segal with Photographer Shawn Brackbill

Karl Mullen looks out at the audience sitting spread before him inside Club Cafe’s darkened lounge. In broad strokes, what he sees is exactly the same as what he saw from his onstage vantage a year ago, five years ago, fifteen years ago: faces, eager, waiting. In fine detail, though, he sees something different. Once upon a time he was accustomed to crowds of faces his own age — accompanied in more recent years by the corollary faces of young children. But the hundred pairs of eyes staring back at him tonight belong to people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. They have come in pairs, in groups, alone. They are dressed in rich semi-formal evening wear, and they are dressed in rough jeans and flannels. In short, they do not fit a demographic.Each of them, Mullen knows, has a unique story to tell. And if he could get behind their faces into their brains, he would find that each of them sees him, and the group of musicians onstage with him, a little differently.

There’s the professorial-looking woman in the front row who’s been captivated by Mullen’s growly, gravelly poetry ever since he led the punk band Carsickness two decades ago. There’s the bunch of thirty-ish preps at the bar: ex-Brownie Mary fans who discovered this band’s rocking rhythm through osmosis when guitarist Rich Jacques joined a year and a half ago. There’s the affectionate couple seated smack dab in the middle of the room who came to applaud for fiddle player Megan Williams, formerly of the Fuzzy Comets, as loudly as possible. And there’s the bespectacled young man standing at the back shaking his head in wonder that Mullen has reinvented his band — formerly called the Ploughman’s Lunch, and at various times ascribed to genres as wildly variant as ska-punk, Celtic folk and roots rock — yet again.

As many perspectives as people fill the room, and this makes Karl Mullen happy. It means, among other things, that his music is art that speaks to the eternal human condition — not just an entertainment product that can be easily sold to a large mass of same-thinking consumers. It means that the spectrum of people who’ll buy Mullen’s new album Mercy Me With Curses will be as diverse and colorful as the sounds and words and pictures that make up the record itself. (See album review.)

It also, according to conventional wisdom, means Mercy Me won’t make a ton of money. Because the central paradox of the commercial music industry today is that the less definable an album’s potential audience is, the less likely it is that any of the major record labels — which tend to see music not in melodies and lyrics but in targeted demographics — will consider it marketable.

But this particular musician isn’t thinking about that right now. He’s smiling at all the faces. “I’m Karl Mullen,” he tells them, “otherwise known as Karl Mullen” — a few laughs reach his ears from those who understand that just last week this act was still called the Ploughman’s Lunch — “and this is the best band in the entire world.”

Typical rock & roll hyperbole? Sure. But Mullen says it with the sort of offhand, matter-of-fact certainty no cocky young rocker could ever pull off. And as a jaunty acoustic guitar lick, a jovially inquisitive electric guitar squeal and a puppy-dog-rollicking drumbeat quickly weave through one another into the air so effortlessly that every eye in the joint misses the moment when the musicians started moving — and as Mullen croons the opening lyric “This one’s for keeps” — it’s hard not to think at the very least this might be the best band in Pittsburgh.

A correction, though: Exactly three eyes in the club do, in fact, catch the exact instant the group begins humming and strumming. Not three pairs — three individual eyes. They aren’t human. In fact, they’re not even flesh and blood. But they’re the most diligently attentive eyes in the audience: three robotic video cameras, discreetly panning, tilting and zooming from their unobtrusive ceiling mounts just above the audience’s heads.

If you were to follow the cameras’ wiring back through the walls, you’d end up on the second floor of the building, the part of Club Cafe the audience never sees. You’d pass through a closed door into a tiny room, just big enough to hold three men and three intimidating high-tech consoles.

First, the equipment: On the left, a 32-channel sound mixing board, an exact twin of the live concert board downstairs. On the right, a Trinity video switching unit, with four color monitors arrayed around a central computer control screen. In the middle, a stack of digital recording devices, built to capture crystal-clear sound and video onto multi-track DAT and ADAT tapes.

This is the kind of stuff you’d find in a professional television studio. It has no business being in a little cabaret on Carson Street. And yet here it is.

And here are the men wielding it: Barney Lee at the audio board. Clay Kisker at the video board. And Marco Cardamone sitting behind and between them, watching both.

Call them audiovisual engineers if you will, but do it in grand, ornate capital letters. Because they’re not mere techies. They’re the masterminds behind this club — this stylish, 21st-century, anomalously high-tech club — and also behind Merging Media, the nascent music empire that hopes to put Pittsburgh back on the national music map for the first time since Rusted Root.

That’s a pretty ambitious scheme. And while it’ll be some time before Cardamone and company determine their success or failure, they know one thing for certain: Merging Media couldn’t have gotten started on the right path without Karl Mullen’s new album as the company’s first record release.

Because how can you build a world-class music business without a world-class piece of music?

A few weeks after Mullen’s Club Cafe performance, a roomful of eyes is once again upon him. This time, though, the tables have turned somewhat: Instead of being larger than life onstage, Mullen’s face is reduced to the size of a 13-inch video monitor. Actually, it’s displayed simultaneously on four monitors. So in a sense the performer has managed for once to surround his audience.

Then Marco Cardamone presses the fast-forward button, making the Irish songwriter’s image zoom along in a comical high-speed dance toward the next part of the recording, and it becomes clear that while in performance Mullen is the master of his own destiny, in the video editing room it’s the tech-heads — namely, Cardamone, Lee and Kisker — who now shape and polish his image for the world to see.

They’ve taken some 16 hours worth of video footage and edited it down to the 18-minute promotional documentary that’s now screening in front of them: song clips from the two-night Club Cafe show inter-cut with talking-head interviews with Mullen.

“We’re new to this whole thing,” admits Cardamone, Merging Media’s president and CEO, “but it’s fun working with Karl. He’s a very interactive sort of guy.”

Lots of adjectives jump to mind when the average Pittsburgh scenester thinks of veteran songwriter and all-around music guru Karl Mullen: passionate, artistic, political, ubiquitous, well-connected, poetic. Leave it to an Internet entrepreneur like Cardamone to settle on interactive.

A year ago, Merging Media — an intimate, artist-friendly music company that seeks to vertically integrate the businesses of management, promotion, performance, recording and distribution through both Internet and radio — was just an idea that had been stewing in Marco Cardamone’s head for a while. He was still the head of the Pittsburgh branch of the Internet design company that had achieved national success and fame as USWeb and later changed its name to marchFIRST. And Cardamone was financially set for life, having sold his earlier graphics company Electronic Images to USWeb in 1997 for $65 million in stock.

What he and USWeb comrades Lee and Kisker were not was spiritually fulfilled.

“We had a passion for music,” Cardamone says, “and we wanted to turn that into our business. We wanted to leverage our assets into an industry we felt we could make a difference in.”

Himself an amateur musician with plenty of professional friends in the industry — most notably Lee, who for 17 years prior to partnering with Cardamone ran Pittsburgh’s popular AirCraft recording studio — Cardamone saw the new Internet technology of the late ’90s as an opportunity not just to make money, but to build a new kind of music business. It would be able to treat emerging artists with the respect and attention they could get from a small record label, while providing the same sorts of integrated, cross-media services that a major label would offer.

He began laying the groundwork in March 1999, when he and Lee bought the then-defunct Club Cafe, formerly a jazz venue, and started pouring money into it. They renovated all summer, paying equal attention to the sophisticated, upscale interior design and the state-of-the-art audio/video recording facilities, and opened in September of that year.

To help guide the club’s artistic direction, they hired Jay Koval as general manager. Koval had eight years under his belt as a waiter in Cardamone’s family-owned four-star restaurant Cafe Allegro (right across the street from Club Cafe), and Cardamone knew him as someone with both valuable bar-management experience and a lifelong appreciation of great music.

In the venue’s early months, Pittsburghers weren’t sure exactly why this revamped Club Cafe should be a destination. “We’ve taken some risks with the diversity of our acts,” says Koval. “People know what Nick’s Fat City is, they know what the James Street Tavern is, they know what the 31st Street Pub is. But Club Cafe — one day we’ve got Roger Humphries playing jazz, the next day we’ve got Too Tall Jones playing rock, the next we’ve got a singer-songwriter circle.”

But Koval’s vision of the club’s schedule reflects Cardamone’s ultimate vision for Merging Media. Never mind the genre, Koval says: “We want to offer quality acts. I know it sounds crazy when you’re talking about a little 110-seat nightclub like this, but we want to affect people.”

One thing Koval knows isn’t crazy talk: The first act to fill the club with a big audience was Karl Mullen’s band, the Ploughman’s Lunch.

That was in October 1999. By April 2000, Cardamone was confident enough in his business plan for Merging Media to start engineering the buy-back of his South Side office complex from USWeb/ marchFIRST. Two months later, he and his partners were once again their own bosses. It felt good.

“There was more corporate pressure before,” says Kisker, now Merging Media’s director of content development, when he remembers the USWeb days. “Checkpoints that had to be made — ‘Did you meet your numbers?’ It was the corporate drone thing. Now we set our own destiny. If we don’t want to do something, we change course.”

In June, Merging Media acquired Insider Radio, a small Pittsburgh-based company that produces a nationally syndicated radio talk show called Internet Insider. The show, an advice forum for casual Internet users, began on KDKA radio in 1994 and is now carried in 300 markets nationwide. Between the on-air broadcast and the interactive website that’s its online counterpart, Internet Insider reaches an estimated 50 million people a month.

“There’s lots of potential for crossover,” Cardamone says casually. You’ve got to hand it to the man, he’s got a talent for understatement. He’s launching a company that plans to sell music online, starting with Karl Mullen’s; great idea, says the critic, but with all those websites already out there, how on earth does he expect to get anyone’s attention? Well, yeah, buying a radio show that already reaches 50 million Internet surfers a month just might offer some potential for crossover. Can anyone say — ka-ching?

Even in Karl Mullen’s own living room he can’t escape the constant gaze of dozens and dozens of intent faces. But even more so than when he’s onstage, in his living room we can safely assume that he likes being pored over.

Because he didn’t just invite these stares — he created them.

Painting after painting hangs on each of the white concrete walls that surround him as he sits drinking tea. Paintings of faces: sharp faces, blurred faces, mellow faces, glaring faces. Yet almost all of them are thin, smooth-headed, bony — as if they’re the reflection of Mullen’s audiences through the structure of his own face. In a slightly surreal way, the spectacle is a low-tech mirror of the variant Mullen-monitors that fill the Merging Media video suite.

In fact, Mullen’s whole artistic career since he emigrated to Pittsburgh from Dublin 24 years ago has been a kind of low-tech mirror of the Merging Media concept. He’s a musician who plays the guitar, the tin whistle, the harmonium; a poet who writes, sings, orates; a visual artist who paints with tea, mud and his own blood; a manager of the commercially thriving Rosebud/ Metropol entertainment complex by day and a resident of the art-for-its-own-sake Spinning Plate Artists’ Lofts by night. If the word “multimedia” had been coined back in the Steam Age instead of the Electronic Age, dictionaries probably would have printed a picture of Mullen next to the term’s definition.

It’s his mature, experienced hand with every aspect of the music scene from production to promotion, as much as it is his great album, that makes Mullen the ideal test project for Merging Media as the company announces its presence to the world.

For all his organic earthiness, though — for all the super-low-budget, one-take live records he’s made in the past — there’s nothing rough-sounding about his new album. Moody, textured and at times downright edgy, yes, but not rough. Mullen spent $35,000 to land star Irish producer Kevin Moloney, who’s worked with U2 and Sinead O’Connor, and to record Mercy Me With Curses at Mr. Small’s Funhouse, the comfy Millvale studio co-owned by Liz Berlin of Rusted Root.

“This time out,” says Mullen, “we’re saying it’s as good as, say, Wood’s last record. We’re not saying it’ll get the same sales or distribution, but it’s as good.”

Mullen admits he has little idea whether or not Merging Media, an infant company made up of visionary but music-novice media professionals, will be able to do things for his career on a national level. But he likes their ideas, he likes their confidence in his work — and what the hell, he always likes working with smart, do-it-yourself types who are trying something creative and risky.

“Are we really in the age of Internet-savvy consumers,” he wonders, who will pick up on a multimedia approach to music distribution? “I don’t know. But I do know that since we’ve gone online with our mailing list, we’ve found that we’ve picked up a much younger audience — a lot of young women, 23 to 28. If you’d asked me on paper, what’s our main demographic — well, I don’t know what I would have said, but I don’t think it would have been that.”

Marco Cardamone isn’t surprised that the music world emerging online doesn’t quite resemble the industry that veterans have grown to expect. “There’s a great deal of disorder and chaos in the music industry thanks to new technology,” he says. “Napster specifically, and the Internet in general. There’s great promise to it, but also great uncertainty. When there’s chaos, there’s opportunity — but we don’t want to join the ranks of the deceased.”

A mere 11 months ago, the Internet economy was at the pinnacle of its hype, with tech stocks continuing to reach astronomical levels. Then in March investors began coming to their senses, and stocks started crashing. “I know a lot of companies,” says Cardamone, “friends of mine, who went out last year and raised $10 million with half-baked business plans and PowerPoint shows. They did all their marketing and setup, and then this year found they couldn’t get their second round of financing.”

Thanks in part to a simple serendipity of timing — Cardamone wasn’t able to devote his full attention to Merging Media until he’d already seen the carnage that struck down many of his would-be peers — he was forced into building his new company with his own fortune rather than that of venture capitalists. In retrospect, he’s glad it happened that way. “I’d much rather ride the curve up than have started at the top and ridden it down,” he says. “What this timing does is put you back to the basics: building a self-funded, grassroots, up-by-the-bootstraps, real business.”

In addition to finishing the preparations to launch Mullen’s album, Cardamone’s team is busy forging relationships with entertainment professionals in Pittsburgh as well as New York and Los Angeles. “Songwriters and label people from out of town,” says Kisker, “they walk in and go, ‘What the hell’s in Pittsburgh? Come to New York and do this.’ But by the end of the night — after they’ve seen a show at Club Cafe, eaten dinner at Cafe Allegro, met the artists we’re working with — they’re asking if we can work together.”

The Merging Media team is also furiously collecting the best recordings to come out of Club Cafe over the past year. “We’re putting it all together as a package,” Cardamone says: “Here’s what we look like as a next-generation music label. Here’s the kind of artist we represent, potentially. Here’s the kind of service we can offer as a live recording venue.”

And at the root of it all lies a determination to show the world that Pittsburgh is a place the music industry should take seriously.

“A lot of people in town were prognosticating the scene was drying up,” Cardamone says. “Ignorantly or not, we found the opposite to be true: There is a lot of musical talent in the city of Pittsburgh. We’d sensed that when we decided to open Club Cafe, and now the club has confirmed from a very on-the-street, brick-and-mortar level that there’s a lot going on.

“Ultimately, we believe Pittsburgh has the potential to be another Seattle, another Austin. Will we get there right away? Will we get there alone? No. It’ll be a half engineered, half organic process. What we’re doing is creating a context — an organic goo — and seeing what grows out of it.”

Cardamone rattles off a few names of local acts he expects to be working with in coming months: singer/songwriter Bill Deasy of the Gathering Field; torch singer and sometime circus freak Mandy Kivowitz, a.k.a. Phat Man Dee, of Margalit and the Liquitones; avant jazz group Opek 15. And he suggests there are several more he’s got one level down in his brain.

His colleague Kisker suggests in turn that those or any artists could do worse than to throw in their lot with Merging Media.

“You’re not going to find a nicer guy then Marco,” says Kisker. “Anyone who’s ever worked for him will tell you that. He’ll give you the shirt off his back, and the $100 bills out of his pocket. And that attitude trickles down through the company. It’s a good team.”

He grins. “You work your whole life in order to not have to work with assholes. And I think I’ve found the group of non-assholes I want to work with.”

Karl Mullen plays live on WYEP 91.3-FM at 3 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 22. He performs at Club Café, South Side, with Pat Kilbride on Sat., Nov. 25; call 431-4950 for more info. Mullen’s CD release concert, featuring his full band, is at Rosebud, Strip District, on Sat., Dec. 1, with opener Sarah Harmar; call 261-2221 for more info. The band returns to Club Café on Sun., Dec. 2, with opener Jennie Stearns.

INPGH editor Stephen H. Segal’s last cover story profiled the Pittsburgh Poetry Slam team [July 26].

CD Review

Mercy Me With Curses ***3/4
Listeners already familiar with Karl Mullen’s primal, visceral songwriting will be overwhelmed upon hearing what it sounds like coming through a subtly textured, polished, big-sounding production job that would do Peter Gabriel proud. And listeners who’ve never heard Mullen’s work will simply be overwhelmed by how gloriously, achingly beautiful it all is. Beginning with an ode to joy titled “Standing, Waiting,” Mullen’s lyrical and melodic hooks — in this case, a plaintive, repetitive cry of “From the cradle to the grave” that builds in tension toward a final, blessed release — embody all that makes simple something different and better than simplistic. But while the tunes are simple, their arrangements are decidedly not, and it’s a pointed irony that this first album on which Mullen has abandoned his long-standing band name of the Ploughman’s Lunch (hoping to leave behind the group’s Irish-folk baggage) is the most vitally band-centric of the six records he’s released in the past decade. Virtuoso drummer Tom Compton shuffles soulfully through the old-school R&B number “This Old World” even as sax stalwart Don Roehlich, who’s been with Mullen since the beginning, conjures days of Motown yore with his most fluid, tear-jerking turn ever. Track five is the big one, the could-be radio hit: “Mercy Me With Curses,” a pained, poetic, down-here-under-the-stars ballad that sees guitarist Rich Jacques conjure up a classic Edge-style chime effect that gives the truth to the chorus lyric “I can’t get you out of my head.” Mullen saves the best for last, though: the masterpiece “Sing Out,” a reinvention of his once wildly thrashing, ten-year-old ska-punk song “History of the World” into a slow, slow, slow four minutes of borderline avant-garde reggae-chant driven by Megan Williams’ hauntingly dissonant violin and tinged with harmony singer Jennifer Goree’s most ethereal vocal to date. Big-name producer Kevin Moloney may have cost Mullen a chunk of money, but if he’s responsible for pushing the band to this level of brilliance he was worth every dime.

New Economy Workers Thirst For A Place To Network

Story By Emily tipping, Photo By D.M. Scott

Christina Schulman isn’t sure how bar and club owners would go about catering to members of the new economy.

Drink discounts for Web designers? Two-for-one appetizers for dot-com entrepreneurs?
“What would you do,” Schulman joked, “have people solve programming programs at the door?”
Schulman, custom applications team lead for MediaSite, formerly ISLIP Media, Downtown, doesn’t think tech industry folk should really be catered to, anyway, calling Pittsburgh a “segregated enough city as it is.”

Still, the co-founder of Geek Night, an every-other-month tech industry event at the Foundary Ale Works in the Strip District, agrees wholeheartedly with plans to build a membership club for tech entrepreneurs, students, workers and investors.

The Pittsburgh Hot Team, a network of 30 entrepreneurs brought together by the Heinz Endowments Civic Entrepreneurship Initiative to boost entrepreneural growth and new-economy efforts in the region, last month announced efforts to create what is temporarily being called the New Economy Club.

The group has started fund raising for the $3 million necessary to start the venture, has chosen an architect and is negotiating a lease for three floors at 922 Penn Ave., Downtown.

Preliminary plans call for a restaurant, a cyber café with Internet portals and lost of espresso drinks, a 200-person banquet facility, meeting rooms, a game/entertainment room, an outdoor climbing wall and no dress code. Hot Team members hope to have the club open by next summer.

“I’d be inclined to check it out,” said Schulman. “Factors for me would be cost, whether it’s open at night and are my friends there?”

Hot Team member Ava DeMarco, co-founder of Littlearth Productions, a company that designs and makes goods from recycled materials, said membership dues for the club will be on a sliding scale to make it affordable for people right out of college. She said the Hot Team has received plenty of positive reaction to the club concept.

“The reason for the New Economy Club idea is that tech industry people had no real place to call home. People and companies are spread out everywhere, so there’s no place where people naturally congregate,” said DeMarco.

Geography plays a huge role in where tech workers – or any workers, really – go to relax after work or on weekends, although Schulman said some employees at TransArc, Downtown, in the past have treated the Sharp Edge in Friendship as a local watering hole because “they are really picky about their beer.”

Pittsburgh people, especially, tend to treat certain neighborhoods solely as destination spots, said Marco Cardamone, co-owner of Club Cafe in the South Side. Cardamone, also co-owner of Merging Media Inc., an internet content business focused on music, said he believes there are things bar and club owners can do to attract a new-economy clientele.

Club Cafe has hosted events for the Pittsburgh Technology Council and other tech groups. And Cardamone said he has been collaborating with some tech types from Carnegie Mellon University on ways to “program” Club Cafe.

In addition to wiring the space for Merging Media’s streaming audio and video music performances, Cardamone said club waitresses might soon be wearing video cameras for bar Web casts, letting people check out the scene from remote portals.

When all is said and done, Cardamone said he’s not sure technology alone can attract techies. Like anyone else, they enjoy places with a “cool vibe,” he said.

Or at least good beer and lots of networking opportunities, it seems. The hottest tech hangouts to date are geared toward organized industry events, such as the monthly, FreeMarkets – sponsored CoolTech happy hour at Froggy’s Downtown, or Geek Night at the Foundry.

Schulman said a friend recommended the Foundry when she and four other tech workers decided to organize a cocktail party so they could all visit with mutual friends. That was the fall of 1998, and about 30 people showed up.

They came back, she said, because of the good beer, free parking and upstairs balcony space at the brew pub, but also because more and more tech workers showed interest, sending electronic RSVPs in early to the group Web site, www.pghgeeks.org. At the last Geek Night event in early June, Schulman said between 400 and 500 people stopped by over the course of the Thursday evening. They have long outgrown the upstairs balcony, and the Foundry issues plastic cups because it can’t was glasses fast enough.

Foundry co-owner Paul Williams said he had no reservations about opening the whole space up for Geek Night, because they have hosted large parties for other groups.

“They’re well behaved, he said. What makes it easy, he said, are Geek Night corporate sponsors who pay a flat rate for buffet-style food so people don’t have to order off of the menu.”

“They’re a good group,” said Williams, who now sees a lot of the same Geek Night faces at other times in the Foundry.

June 26, 2000

Cardamone Starts New Music Venture
Merging Media Inc. Supplies Internet Content

By Patty Tascarella, Pittsburgh Business Times

Marco Cardamone has come full circle. Three years ago, he sold his digital communications company
Electronic Images to USWeb in a $65 million stock deal. After a public offering and two subsequent mergers for the parent organization, now known as marchFIRST, Mr. Cardamone has bought his way back out.
He and business partner Barney Lee put up an undisclosed seven-figure sum for 20 employees and the 40,000-square-foot digital studio and office in the Terminal Buildings. The operation now will be known as Merging Media Inc., an Internet content business focused on music, specifically new artists. MarchFIRST holds a minority interest in Merging Media and will be a customer.

The deal closes July 1, the anniversary of the sale of Electronic Images.

Mr. Cardamone said Merging Media will “identify, sign, cultivate, develop, produce, market and, ultimately, sell” the works of new artists to “an emerging audience” of net-savvy consumers, with new forms of musical and “merged media” entertainment experiences. A key market, he said, is the 79 million baby boomers that he deems as an underserved market in terms of entertainment needs.

“We will be a broadband and Internet-centric content company,” he said. “Our core content offering will focus on original music and musical acts. But as our Merging Media name and business vision imply, we will surround our musical acts with a video, radio, club and publishing play. And we will surround all of that with a digital media `services’ play.”

The company will provide digital distribution of traditional products like CDs and tapes to consumers and entertainment venues. Essentially, Merging Media will make its money by assembling a stable of musicians. Individual shoppers will pay Merging Media to buy the musicians’ work; clubs will pay Merging Media a fee to broadcast live concerts, taped performances or interviews.

One of the forums to broadcast concerts by Merging Media artists is Club Cafe, the South Side nightspot wired for Webcasting — the process of using streaming audio and video for Internet transmission, which is under way at fewer than 100 clubs nationwide. Club Cafe is also co-owned by Mr. Lee and Mr. Cardamone.

Mr. Cardamone said planning for Merging Media has been in the works for months, though discussions about spinning out began in April.

“I had three-year education that was unparalleled in my experience,” said Mr. Cardamone. “I wanted to start a new enterprise and to leverage that knowledge.”

The 40-something Mr. Cardamone was a career entrepreneur in Boston and New York in the 1980s, returned to his hometown in 1987 to create Electronic Images. When it became part of USWeb, he became the office’s managing partner.

USWeb had less than 200 employees in 1997 and 50 of them came from Electronic Images. Now, as marchFIRST, it has more than 9,000 employees and is a worldwide presence with 70 offices and a market capitalization of $3.5 billion. MarchFIRST was created via the late 1999 merger between USWeb and information technology consulting firm Whittman-Hart Inc.

“The Pittsburgh office evolved into the Digital Media Practice Center for USWeb,” Mr. Cardamone said. “We focused on providing rich media content development services — including audio and video, digital photography, print communications and Internet development services — to both USWeb’s offices and global client bases, and internally to its corporate and marketing communications groups.”

Once the USWeb/Whittman-Hart merger was completed in second quarter 2000, the Pittsburgh office became part of the marchFIRST Global Service Offerings Group. Since Whittman-Hart already had a Robinson Township office, about two-thirds of Mr. Cardamone’s employees were shifted there from the Terminal Building. He wanted to concentrate on the music concept and thought the best way to do so was by spinning out.

Although there are many original music sites on the Internet — including iuma.com, garageband.com, changemusic.com — “nobody is making much money from it,” observed Jay Green, president of the Downtown sound production company Big Science and a member of the band tendercrush.

Mr. Green believes an approach like Merging Media’s has a strong shot for success — with shoppers as well as with talent — providing that it is streamlined. Musicians can put their sound onto the Web easily and cheaply, but the bulk of the offerings are disorganized and overwhelming to all but the most discerning surfer.

“Most of what people do — myself included, sadly to say — is download music they can’t get anywhere else,” he said. “Some of those sites are so indie and antiestablishment you can’t buy the product. I downloaded a kid recording in a basement in Tempe, Ariz., kicking out some grooves I like, but that’s it, that’s all he’s got. I’d take more of it but he doesn’t have a CD.”

He said tendercrush released its first few songs onto the Internet.

“Thousands of people have downloaded our music and if it were translatable to dollars, I’d have a significant royalty check,” he said. “But the nature of how it’s organized — some sites attempt to steer a casual surfer into a purchase, but it doesn’t happen. People take music that’s free, listen to it and discard it. And that’s that.”

Club Cafe To Broadcast Small, Intimate Concerts To Global
Audience Via The World Wide Web

By Tim Schooley

Don’t let the art-deco facade at Club Cafe in Bedford Square fool you. Behind its classic front, Club Café is equipped with two 32-channel consoles that give a wide range of possibilities for recording audio and digital video.

“It’s almost like pulling up a remote truck to record live events,” explained Barney Lee, one of the club’s partners, on the technology they’ve installed. “We basically put the truck upstairs.”

Looking beyond developing merely a successful nightclub, Mr. Lee and partner Marco Cardamone are looking to webcast its events.

The console downstairs is for the audio and video recording of live events the club hosts. The console upstairs is for eventual use as a source of webcasting, the process of using streaming audio and video for transmission over the Internet – a feature Mr. Cardamone and Mr. Lee hope to begin offering in the next six months.

“We founded the club to become a place where local talented musicians across a variety of genres – jazz, blues, rock, pop – would have a small intimate, hip venue in which to showcase their work,” said Mr.Cardamone. “Once you have an environment where local and national acts can come and do their thing in an intimate setting, we wanted to bring that out to the world through webcasts.”

Club Cafe’s heavy emphasis on high-tech recording capability is even more unusual when you consider the club’s size. While the use of webcasting at night clubs can be found at trend-setting clubs such as the Knitting Factory in New York City, which has more than one concert stage, Club Cafe has a capacity of only 110 customers.

Don’t think small; think intimate, say the owners. “For the audience, you have a proximity to the performer that makes you a part of the performance that you wouldn’t have in a much larger venue,” said Mr. Cardamone. “We want to preserve and capture the best of a live performance and play that in the context of the Internet.”

It could be the best of both worlds: an intimate venue and the potential to reach a worldwide audience over the internet. Mr. Lee and Mr. Cardamone believe they may be the first club in Pittsburgh to pursue webcasting.

“We know there’s no one else in the market doing this,” said Mr. Cardamone. “And we wanted to be a first mover.”

Andrew Rasiej, CEO and president of Digital Club Network, a New York-based company that seeks to webcast and archive concerts at 41 clubs throughout the country, said his company has member clubs that are even smaller than Club Cafe.

With less than 100 clubs webcasting throughout the country, he agreed that small could be beautiful, and newly marketable with the help of webcasting.

“At some point, the artists are going to realize that the audience outside of the venue is greater than the audience inside the venue,” said Mr. Rasiej. “And that may be the most provocative idea.”

Shooting for their first webcast in September, Mr. Cardamone and Mr. Lee are perhaps uniquely positioned to do so. They are the principals of the Pittsburgh office of marchFIRST (formerly USWeb), one of the largest Internet services firms in the world, with 8,500 professionals working in 70 offices in 14 countries.

They’re also among the partners who own the successful Cafe Allegro restaurant, located right across the street.

“I think it would be a difficult thing for a club this size to really do,” said Mr. Lee, considering the low volume of a small capacity club with the costs of implementing such high-end technology. “I think what really makes us different is our ability at a high level to capture what is happening in a club from both an audio and a visual expertise,” he added.

Dave Brenner, vice president for new media at the Knitting Factory, said that while his club had been webcasting its events for free for nearly five years, the quality of current webcasting isn’t good enough to make people want to pay for it yet.

“I do believe there’s going to be a convergence of technologies where your TV and your computer and your stereo will be more integrated into one system,” said Mr. Brenner. “When that starts to happen, I think pay-per-view will be a more viable option.”

Since opening last fall, Club Cafe has hosted a wide range of musical acts, featuring such local favorites as Bill Deasy, Roger Humphries and Phat Man Dee, as well as up-and-coming national acts.

The club’s audio and video capabilities offer the possibility of other kinds of entertainment as well, such as short films and spoken word performances.

Mr. Cardamone and Mr. Lee are deciding on the best strategy for marketing their webcasting venture, including whether to offer Club Cafe events as pay-per-view or free.

Perhaps the biggest barrier that is keeping streaming audio and video from really taking off as both an industry and an entertainment outlet is the poor reception available on the traditional modem speeds most people utilize.

That is changing quickly. As broadband Internet access, with its far greater carrying capacity and high-speed connection quality, becomes the norm in American households, the computer will have the potential to be as effective a medium for video as television.

That future is soon enough for Mr. Cardamone and Mr. Lee to begin having early positive discussions with national recording labels, as well as with local radio stations WYEP and WDVE.

Key to the venture will be the talent of the acts themselves as Mr. Lee and Mr. Cardamone work to help local and national artists reach the broader Internet audience.

“What we think we’re really doing is satisfying latent demand. We feel the world is ready for original content and new voices and doesn’t just want to see recycled VH-1 content for the rest of their lives,” said Mr. Cardamone.

“There’s a great range of demographic for new content. We want to be a conduit for that.”