Mixed Messages

Every week, a couple hundred thousand people go to the GetMusic Web site to put their peculiar stamp on pop culture.

One faction heads to the Videolab, where more than 30 music videos from artists such as Ludacris and Deftones wait to be sliced, diced and recombined into mutant slide shows. Another group goes to the online karaoke to warble and record mercifully truncated versions of pop songs through cheap computer microphones.

And amazingly, thousands go to GetMusic (https://www.getmusic.com) just to see and hear the amateur producers’ work. What they find is a mishmash, ranging from polished and striking to gratingly off-key.

GetMusic is one of a small but growing number of sources on the Web for a uniquely participatory form of entertainment, one that relies on consumers to supply some of the labor and creative spark. These do-it-yourself sites tap into some of the same juices that fuel hip-hop culture and electronica--the urge to sample from or deconstruct other people’s work and rebuild it into something new.

It’s a middle ground between games and passive entertainment, a multimedia playroom where the air carries a strong whiff of advertising. For some it’s a public stage; for others it’s a personal messaging system crafted around someone else’s words.

The ventures run counter to a widely held belief that consumers don’t want to work at their entertainment--they just want to be entertained. Technology has long made it possible for viewers to shape stories as they’re being told, but the public has shown little enthusiasm for that kind of interactivity. Nor has the Internet been kind to entrepreneurs peddling do-it-yourself movies or music.

“User-generated content as a whole maybe doesn’t make sense” as a business proposition, said Olivier Zitoun, chief executive of Eveo Inc., a San Francisco company that provides online multimedia technology. But if a Web site lets fans manipulate works of a major artist, he said, “you see immediately the difference in traffic and adoption.”

Besides the GetMusic offerings, examples from around the Web include remixable music videos at BET.com (https://bet.com), DJ-style song editing at MTV.com (https://www.mtv.com) and Beatnik’s Mixman site (https://www.mixman.com), and animated video games with user-designed levels at AtomShockwave (https://www.atomshockwave.com). Those sites use the do-it-yourself entertainment mainly to draw visitors and boost advertising revenue.

Perhaps the most ambitious entry into the field is the new Screenblast site (https://www.screenblast.com) from Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment. Aimed only at consumers with high-speed Internet connections, it mixes passive entertainment with audio-video tools that let users create songs and videos.

Screenblast also supplies the audio-video building blocks: instrumental tracks, film clips and even recorded dialogue. Some of the raw material comes from Sony artists and productions, some from other professional creators and some from the Screenblast rank and file.

The Net has long been a venue for ordinary consumers to spill their creative juices. Witness the popularity of role-playing games and personal Web sites. And the spread of high-speed Internet connections, combined with the emergence of powerful and easy-to-use digital imaging and recording tools, gives consumers more outlets for those creative impulses.

“What our bet has always been, and what we see materializing, is that people want to participate,” said Adi Sideman, founder and chief executive of Oddcast. “And the computer as the networked, interactive multimedia tool that sits on our desktops is a way to do it. It has that power.”

Oddcast is the company behind Videolab, the video remixing software used by GetMusic and BET.com. Videolab users start by picking a song and assembling a palette of still images, film clips and animation. As the song plays, they click on items in the palette in time with the music, stringing the visuals together in the order and rhythm they choose.

Users can mix and match visual elements from any of the Videolab videos, as well as throw in digital snapshots or graphics from their own collections. Most participants stick with what’s available on the site, in part because of the time it takes to upload pictures, Sideman said.

The user-generated videos tend to be quick-cutting slide shows devoted to the familiar icons of pop music--youth, beauty, fashion, sex. But the results are surprisingly slick, thanks largely to the professionally produced clips and images that Videolab provides.

“It’s harder to [mess up] a video when you have a half-a-million-dollar shot of Christina Aguilera at your disposal,” Sideman said. “It’s a lot easier when you have a camcorder.”

For video mixers who yearn for the spotlight, GetMusic has offered this carrot: Each month, one Videolab-doctored music video will win a place in the regular rotation on the MuchMusic cable TV channel. But Sandy Smallens, an executive vice president at GetMusic, said most Videolab users don’t want to submit their work for public scrutiny. Instead, they simply send their creations to their friends via e-mail.

The initial version of Screenblast has a couple of video-mixing elements. One is a do-it-yourself soap opera called “Mixed Emotions” that lets users cut and paste scenes together from prerecorded bits of dialogue and video. Each portion of the script can be assigned to any of the characters and placed in any order, enabling users to decide who’s conniving, who’s a patsy and who ends up on top.

The site also offers powerful video editing software that people can download and use on their own digital videos, on clips provided by Sony or on footage posted by other Screenblast members. Each member has a personal showcase on the site to store a limited number of creations or save favorite bits from other sources.

Oddcast’s counterpart in the field of audio remixing is Beatnik, whose software can be sampled at the MTV, AtomShockwave and Intel home-computing (https://www.intel.com/areaone/index.htm) Web sites. Beatnik deconstructs songs into more than a dozen sonic components, and users reassemble them with some of the pieces missing. Those who want to go a step or two further can buy Mixman software from Beatnik, which lets them toss in musical elements from other songs or their own recordings.

One example on the MTV site is “Who Told You” by rapper Roni Size, which Beatnik breaks into 16 tracks for vocals, samples, synthesizers, strings, bass and percussion. Each track is assigned a letter on the computer keyboard--main vocals on “s,” drums on “k,” high strings on “t” and so forth.

As the song plays, users can drop tracks in and out by punching the appropriate letters on their keyboards or an on-screen mixing board. The Web-based version lets people record and e-mail their mixes to friends. The downloadable Mixman software, which sells for $20, lets them turn their creations into MP3 files.

Screenblast’s do-it-yourself music starts with downloadable software for recording and editing sounds, tracks and songs. Users can cobble together tunes from instrumental and percussion tracks provided by Sony, from other Screenblast members or from their own home studios. The material has the hi-fi sheen of professional recordings, although it takes time and effort to fashion something distinctively original out of the brief loops Screenblast supplies.

As with Screenblast’s video software, the audio tools are more powerful--but also more complex--than the Web-based offerings from Oddcast and Beatnik. The aim, said Andrew Schneider, a Sony senior vice president and general manager of Screenblast, is to build on the communities of music and video fans that already gather on the Net.

Schneider pointed to the fans of rock singer Bjork who’ve posted hundreds of homemade remixes of her songs online at https://www.arktikos.com/bjork. “A passionate following of people, gathering around a brand, and technology that allows them to communicate in a different way--it’s really just an evolution of network communications,” he said.

That audience might not be large enough to attract much support from advertisers. But Sony is betting that those consumers will be so taken with Screenblast, they’ll be willing to pay for it.

Although much of the material on Screenblast is free, users who want advanced versions of the audio and video editing software need to shell out $59 per program or $149 for the set. Sony also plans to launch a premium version of the site early next year that will provide software, audio-video building blocks and other services for a monthly fee.

Sony also hopes that Screenblast will pay strategic dividends by boosting sales of other Sony products. In addition to promoting Sony movies and TV productions, it gives users something to do with Sony computers, digital cameras and camcorders.

GetMusic and BET.com offer a range of material, so they’re not dependent on the user-generated entertainment to pay their bills. Still, Smallens of GetMusic said, video mixing and karaoke have become two of the most popular areas on his site.

The Oddcast-powered karaoke program at GetMusic is just one of many resources on the Net for those who want to sing along with their computers. What’s unusual is that it provides free, professionally recorded backing tracks, along with the ability to post recordings on the Web or e-mail them to pals.

Users start by connecting a microphone to their computers, dialing into the GetMusic karaoke site, then picking a song from a long list of pop, rock, country and rap tunes. The lyrics scroll through the user’s Web browser as the background music plays, and the computer records a low-fi version of the singer’s voice on top of the instrumental tracks.

“Frank Sinatra--how bad can it be if you have his orchestra in the background?” Sideman asked.

The answer is: Pretty bad.

The quality of the postings at GetMusic is all over the map, but on the whole it’s probably a cut below the level at the neighborhood karaoke bar. Unlike the scene at the bar, there’s no live audience of sneering strangers online to deter people from belting out their version of “My Heart Will Go On.”

“Half of the fun is playing it back,” said Robert Friedrich, a senior court clerk in Manhattan and an occasional Oddcast karaoke singer. “You can hear the difference between what you sound like in your own head and what you sound like on the computer.... You don’t sound half as good as you should.”

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Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at jon.healey@latimes.com.