Immergent Unites Downloads, Social Features in All-in-One Site

A 10-year-old record label is morphing into a download store and social network that aims to recreate the environment of the rapidly disappearing brick-and-mortar record store.

Launched this weekend at the NARM convention in Chicago, Immergent has a catalog of 8 million songs licensed from major labels and roughly 80,000 independent labels, with licenses broad enough to cover on-demand streaming, CEO John Trickett told us. But its research and focus groups have shown that such a business is a loser for now, so it’s focusing on conventional downloads, he said. Immergent is part of the 5.1 Entertainment Group, which in the past has championed the hybrid CD/DVD-Audio “DualDisc” for music releases.

Artist development has become “progressively more difficult” over the years, and the dwindling shelf space for music in big-box retailers hasn’t been matched by the rise in digital sales, Trickett said. Immergent, which launched in beta Sunday at Immergent.com, aims to recreate the feeling of a record store, with expert employees and customers who recommend music to each other. From reviewing Internet users’ behavior in buying music online and from talking to “hundreds” of music customers, Immergent learned that users “wanted something different than what they're getting today,” which is an online store where they make a purchase and “get out,” Trickett said.

The site features a scrolling banner featuring top artists, listings of top songs, albums and artists, upcoming shows for a user’s city identified through geotargeting, and user-created playlists. Unlike at sites such as Last.fm and Pandora, there’s no free streaming on Immergent except for song samples. Even playlists are bought: Users create and post their own lists, and the songs cost 79 cents to $1.29 each, as set by their labels. Albums are priced differently: Lady Gaga’s The Fame, for example, is priced at $9.99. Playlist creators don’t get commissions from sales of their lists, just the satisfaction of seeing their recommendations adopted, Trickett said. Every piece of content on the site can be rated. The MP3s start at a minimum 256 kbps but most are encoded at 320 kbps. Trickett said he would “love to go lossless one day,” meaning uncompressed tracks as found on a CD -- a rarity among download stores -- but such big downloads are still too slow for the typical user.

What sets the otherwise old-school site apart is the chat functionality, which Immergent plans to use to connect fans with artists, through typing, voice or webcam video, Trickett said. Users can “drop into” virtual rooms separated by genre, and artists can set up chats with their fans, he said. When we visited the chat rooms Monday afternoon, they were empty. Trickett said much of the site will be built out and improved over the year, and in the next two months in particular, Immergent will identify better-known artists who have pledged to do chats with fans through the site. Several have committed, but dates haven’t been nailed down, he said. Immergent also runs a blog, Sandbox, split between general music news and music that its staffers recommend. Every Monday they gather for lunch -- including “the person who cleans the bathroom at night” -- to decide what to jointly recommend, and staffers also maintain their own recommendation pages, Trickett said.

Trickett acknowledged that just about every function on Immergent is available on other sites, from music recommendations to local concert listings, but he said none brings them all together on the same platform. The site lets users share favorite songs and other content on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites, but it doesn’t plug in to those sites using features such as Facebook Connect. Pandora, for example, is one of three sites that automatically plugs shared users into Facebook through “instant personalization.” Immergent plans to give labels a much more detailed look at their fans through launch of a business analytics platform this year, as well as a program for “emerging” artists called iMMerge. The site is targeting 25- to 45-year-olds to start, because research has found that they prefer to own music rather than access it from the cloud, Trickett said. “Whichever way I crunch the numbers,” he said, he can’t find a workable business model for streaming. But Trickett said he will reconsider that as the economics of digital music change.

The company’s close relationship to the majors shouldn’t be interpreted as control by those labels, Trickett said, agreeing there’s a bad history of label “hype” for online services that never became popular. “The site has its own personality,” despite label contributions in places like the Sandbox blog, for example, he said. “We're not beholden to anybody.” To get its profile up, Immergent is running a contest through June in which five users can each win 100 songs by sharing their opinion about how download stores can serve them better -- www.immergent.com/500free.