by Ben Fong-Torres

AsianConnections is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance man: author, broadcaster, and former senior editor and writer at Rolling Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero!

Ben was a featured character in "Almost Famous," the Oscar and Golden Globe-winning film by Cameron Crowe.
                                                                         -  AC Team

In happier times: MyPlay's launch party, at Slim's nightclub in San Francisco in October, 1999, featured John Hiatt and band. Ben, who MC'd the shindig, is flanked by two writers, Laura "Bonnie" Swezey (left) and Jaan Uhelszki.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Actually, myplay is still around. It�s just that I�m not there anymore -- neither are dozens of fellow former employees -- and the company is a shell of what it envisioned itself to be just two years ago.

Myplay is a digital music site, specializing in providing free "music lockers" for people to store their digital music. They could get that music from various Internet sites, including myplay, or upload them from their own CDs.

They could then zap the tracks into their lockers, freeing up their hard drive space while the music sat in myplay�s huge servers. And they could listen to their music wherever they had access to a computer. They could make up mixes and send them to friends, and post them publicly, so that the whole myplay community could hear them.

They can still do all this. But when I was there, as Editorial Director, myplay was planning to allow music fans to do much more, including buying music from various record companies. And music lockers would be a mere steppingstone to other forms of entertainment and other, yet-to-be-invented media. We'd get into handheld devices and cell phones; we�d stream music, audio and video, to cars and to TV set-top devices.

And, of course, we'd all get rich. As a dot-com startup funded by venture capitalists, myplay offered all employees thousands of stock options, and we worked hard for the potential money. We also had fun, in that wacky way dot-comers do, spurred on by bonding-happy management: We had impromptu Nerf ball wars, slinging rubber balls at each other across our massive offices, sometimes shocking people who were in for job interviews and meetings.

There were chair-top dances to hip-hop and disco music on Thursdays; beer busts on Fridays, spur-of-the-moment trips to a nearby driving range or bumper car track; paid excursions to Vegas, and plenty of free lunches. Employees got free cameras, MP3 players, headsets.

It couldn't last. Strike one was Napster, which scared and pissed off every major record label, and created an insurmountable gap between labels and music sites. Strike two came with the NASDAQ plunge of April 2000. Strike three was a merger with a big portal that didn�t happen.

By fall, the first staff cuts took place, and I left at the end of last year. They were talking about a new business model, shifting from helping labels sell music to selling myplay's locker technology to various businesses. After a few more months, myplay slashed more staffers (and, no doubt, curtailed those trips to Vegas) and began looking for someone to buy it.

Finally, just the other week, Bertelsmann (home of BMG, RCA, and Arista Records) did. But the deal is smaller than one of those compressed MP3 files, and it leaves all of us who had -- and bought -- stock options out of luck -- or, more to the point, money.

Still, myplay lives on. Digital music does, too, and will continue to grow. But after all that talk about revolutionizing music, and of artists taking control of their music back from the major labels; after all the noise generated by Napster, it�s the corporations that are snapping up the rebels, roaring into the digital future, and running the show.

As the late concert promoter Bill Graham once said, "Everything changes; nothing changes..."

RANDOM NOTES: If you haven't caught it yet, check out The Chris Isaak Show on Showtime Monday nights. It's the first sitcom based on rock music that gets it right -- and with Isaak's patented goofball humor... Internet radio got a setback when commercial, on-air stations stopped streaming their shows online, pending working out some rights issues. But there are hundreds of great channels out there, many done or run by artists.

Among your resources: Sonicnet, spinner.com, Yahoo! Radio, AOL Radio, ivillage radio, radiomargaritaville, Live365.com, and ClickRadio, a customizable channel you can hear offline... (I also just discovered �Radio VW,? loaded with great music, plus tracks that have become popular via Volkswagen TV commercials. Go to www.vw.com.)

And KSAN, the free-form FM pioneer station where I deejayed back in the day, has finally gotten cyberspaced. A Web site is up and trucking, at www.jive95.com. And, while the site isn't streaming any shows yet, some airchecks from the '70s can be found on Live365. Simply enter "jive95" when prompted to search.

You younger ones won�t believe what you hear: Deejays sounding human, barely identifying themselves or the station. The emphasis was on music. I'm not represented yet, but I'll send in an old show of mine soon. If I can find a decent one...

Happy 60th to William Wong, a true pioneer among Asian-American journalists. His razor-sharp work over the decades finally has been compiled, in Yellow Journalist. William's family and mine had restaurants directly across from each other on Webster Street in Oakland's Chinatown in the '50s.

He's been a reporter and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, AsianWeek, and others. His commentary is informed and insightful, personal and plainspoken, yet oftentimes passionate. He�s a champion of his people, and of all people. Happy birthday, old neighbor...

Find archives of some of Ben's musings at AsianConnections.com and more
at his official website BenFongTorres.com