ENRAGE ON NET!

Originally published in Enrage magazine, 1994

            Pull on that biker jacket, slip on your mirrorshades and jack into cyberspace, because Enrage, Canada's largest alternative music magazine, is now available on the Internet!

            In association with The Wire, a full-service World Wide Web provider based in Toronto, and the International Music Network, a WWW site available through The Wire, Enrage has entered the cyber age in a big way.

            "The Net and other digital media are the future of publishing," said Enrage publisher Mitch Joel, "We must be out there getting our message across in this medium or we risk becoming irrelevant."

            The International Music Network (IMN) is a new WWW site available through The Wire at http://www.the-wire.com/imn. Founded by industry veteran John Ross, a former recording studio operator and band manager, IMN is the Canadian music industry's only voice currently on the Internet.

            "IMN is a full-service provider to the music industry and companies. We provide access to our services to individuals over the Internet for free," Ross explains.

            "Most music areas on the Internet are set up by musicians or people who are friends of musicians, who do it sort of as a hobby," he continues. "IMN is more focussed on getting Canadian content on the Internet, which is lacking right now in the music scene. We hope to get the Canadian industry more knowledgeable about the Internet. Quite a few American record labels are already on the Internet, but in Canada the only company with a real presence so far is Network Records."

            "Enrage is involved with IMN because we like their approach and their philosophy," says publisher Joel. "We particularly like the fact that they are actively promoting all types of Canadian music globally, and that they provide links to all the important music areas on the net.

            "We can't think of a better way to promote Enrage or the Canadian hard music scene in general.

            "We'd like to provide Canadians with an outlet to search the world and seek out what's going on," continues Ross. "A tool for the advancement of whatever they're up to musically. We're open to all types of music, we have everything from deathmetal to R&B hiphop, classical, jazz, blues. There's so much on the Internet right now that you wouldn't be able to find it if you were on it for the rest of your life.

            "What we're trying to do for our clients is provide a space that will link to other spaces rather than forcing to discover them as you travel randomly."