After the rapid crash-and-burn of the 2008 reinvention of elviscostello.com, there is obviously a basic awareness among EC and his people that a new Costello "web concept" has to actually offer something of interest if it's going to be worth anything at all. Otherwise, they might as well just leave it as it is, minus the subscriptions-- since EC gave up on actively participating in his site back in 2002, the updates they (or the record company people) did for NORTH, TDM and TRIR were all pretty perfunctory, and they could return to that kind of site almost instantly. A few of us would take notice of the change and then it would be basically ignored by most fans the way that it was, generally, from 2002 to 2008.
So EC and his team-- whoever is putting together the new "web concept"-- must be thinking of what they can do to make a new website worth their time and effort. They would do well to look at Dylan's website, which is relatively simple and has consistently been more impressive than EC's for the past decade, and is doing a pretty good job of attracting interest in the run-up to his new album.
Offering the first track ("Beyond Here Lies Nothin'") as a free mp3 for 24 hours, and making a second track available in streaming format ("I Feel A Change Comin' On") is the type of move that is probably counter-intuitive for a lot of artists, who might feel like they are simply GIVING away their music, but it makes perfect sense. Almost everybody downloading "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" is gonna end up buying the album-- the free track giveaway is basically the 2009 equivalent of what used to be releasing an advance single to radio, or premiering the video on MTV. EC actually did this back in 2002, when you could listen to "Tear Off Your Own Head" on his website well before WIWC came out, and it didn't seem to hurt that album's sales one bit. There's no reason I can think of that his website shouldn't be streaming "Complicated Shadows" right this very minute when you go to visit his website. (It's already available
here, so why not there?)
Likewise, the serialized Dylan interview with Bill Flanagan is a nice feature-- now, obviously, a new Dylan interview is bigger news because, well, he's DYLAN. And Bob's comments on Obama managed to make news and spread all over the place in a way that even a really great Costello interview is unlikely to achieve. But lord knows, EC loves to talk, and he's good at it. Why not have him sit down every now and then with somebody smart who can ask him questions, record it all, and put it on the site? They'd never run out of material.
And anytime EC sits down to write something in prose-- liner notes, magazine articles or the lengthy "journal" entries he contributed to the site back in '02 and resumed last year and recently-- it's never less than compelling. It seems like it wouldn't be that difficult for him to contribute some kind of new writings for his own website on a semi-regular basis. In fact, I suspect that the real difficulty for EC might be that once he gets started, there's no stopping him. The length of his journal entries and answers to fans' questions back in 2002 would indicate that he found it all a bit too time-consuming a distraction.
Every time I've listened to Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, I think that, as great as it is to hear Bob as DJ, Costello is even better at it. His occasional guest appearances on Irish radio in the late 90s were tremendous fun-- he picks great music and is of course very sharp and witty in the way he presents it. It occurs to me that, considering how much dislike and disinterest he has expressed regarding the Internet, it's amazing how ideally-suited he seems to be for blogging and podcasting. Loves to write, loves to talk, and is extremely adept at both. Whoever's working on this site, it seems like they should set it up so it's as easy as possible for him to write or record something and have it appear on the site whenever he wants, as soon as he wants it.
There are other fun things about the way Dylan's site is set up at the moment-- you can register and make playlists of Dylan songs, and every week a new featured playlist is chosen, and those songs are fully playable in the little streaming jukebox set-up they have. The way his discography is presented is attractive and easy to navigate, and all the lyrics are there, and it's just easy and nice and fun. By contrast, the EC 2008 redesign is more than a little clunky and difficult.
It's pretty easy to figure out what a good official Costello site would have-- a lot of words and music, and maybe some video. And if they want to make any money off of it, sell cool stuff. A perfect example of the wrong-headed thinking of this last redesign was the big banner ads announcing that Taking Liberties and Out Of Our Idiot were
finally available to buy as mp3 downloads-- as if there was this great mass of EC fans out there who just couldn't figure out how to get mp3s of those songs off of their CDs.
Unreleased stuff. New stuff. Live recordings, demos, obscure things that would never warrant a full-scale CD release. This is the type of stuff that a new site should offer, if it's going to have any real point. And it would be smart to have some of it be free, but if he recorded a new song and wanted to charge a dollar or two, I'd buy it and so would a lot of other people. Actually, a lot more people than have been buying any CD singles he's released since "Veronica."
Part of me feels like a sap for agreeing that the "third time's the charm." And if they were just saying "we give up, here's your money back, Costello hates websites" then I'd probably just throw up my hands and lament that it sucks that they couldn't make it work. But the mere fact that they still seem to be trying to work this out indicates to me that they will do it, and do it right this time. Because this isn't figuring out how to save the planet or cure cancer-- all they have to do is make a website that Costello fans will like, and that could also attract the curious non-fan in a way that would make them want to become one. And the way to do that is to make the site interesting and fun and worth visiting. This is entirely do-able.