tech

Thirty years ago, when Megadeth was the first musical artist ever to participate in a “chat room” on its “website” on the “Internet,” an anonymous troll posted a single word over and over, to the point of driving Dave Mustaine crazy. “I looked at it like, ‘How do I get rid of this thing?’” the metal band’s frontman and guitarist tells Billboard. “I still, to this day, don’t know who the guy was. There was no one else, so this guy saw that as an opportunity.”
What was the word?

“S—,” Mustaine recalls.

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Such were the travails of the virtual city of Megadeth, Arizona, in October 1994. As envisioned by Robin Bechtel — then sales director for Megadeth’s label, Capitol Records — Megadeth, Arizona,  based on the location of the band’s new studio in Phoenix, was the concept for the first-ever artist website. In addition to the chat room, called the Megadiner, the site featured an art-and-digital-postcard repository, Vic’s Cactus Hut and Souvenir Shop, a newspaper titled Horrorscopes and links to videos and online-radio tracks. It was designed to promote Megadeth’s album Youthanasia, but its legacy ultimately became to “onboard people onto the World Wide Web,” according to Bechtel, today an angel investor in Uber, Everlane and others, “which is wild to think about.”

Megadeth

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Bechtel, a digital music pioneer who later worked at Warner, first envisioned the Megadeth concept while touring a multimedia studio in Los Angeles and learning about the use of Macromedia software in videos and websites. She signed up for the dial-up service CompuServe and set up a modem at her apartment. At Capitol, she wrote a proposal for the Megadeth website and requested a $30,000 budget. Her boss, Lou Mann, senior vp of sales and field marketing, agreed, even if other Capitol employees had no idea what she was talking about. Earlier that year, Tim Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and it was catching on among tech insiders and early adopters, but the idea would take years to spread to music fans — and record executives.

“I wrote a proposal. It’s hysterical — it’s me trying to explain what a website would be,” Bechtel recalls. “We had a Megadeth record coming out. I was invited to the meeting. Nobody knew what the Internet was. Everyone was focused on who was going to shoot the album cover, and would the cover make the poster and would the cover and poster be in the record stores.” 

It was the first time among many, during Bechtel’s label career, that she would be told the Internet was a fad.

Megadeth

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“She made a big presentation about it, and there were maybe 10 people in the room. Nine of the people didn’t even understand what she was talking about: ‘What is this fake city?’” recalls Mann, now CEO of StageIt, which broadcasts live performances online. “There were a lot of traditionalists in our industry. You play it on the radio, you get it in the stores. But this was a new way of marketing. It was tough. They were dubious and it affected other things.”

Mann believes the industry skepticism of Megadeth, Arizona, represented a broader overall skepticism of new technology threatening music’s business model, largely built on marketing and selling CDs. This attitude, within labels, lingered through the late ’90s. For example, Capitol released a Duran Duran single online, and old-school record retailers did not react kindly. Later, when Napster popped up and threatened the business model of selling CDs in stores, piracy-fearing label execs neglected an opportunity to create a new business model. “It was a whole industry education that was taking place,” Mann recalls. “Nobody wanted it, because it challenged the protocol. On the other hand, that was the beauty of it.”

Megadeth

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Megadeth, Arizona, launched with grey backgrounds and Times Roman typefaces — “That’s how limited it was back then,” Bechtel says. And while the website may not have moved the needle on Youthanasia sales, it generated copious attention in newspapers and magazines. “Once Megadeth got involved, it took off,” she adds. “The band was always in there logging into the Megadiner. They saw it, I think, as modern-day tape-trading. They totally got it.”

Soon other artists were demanding websites, too. Mustaine heard KISS‘ Gene Simmons had said, “I want a website just like Mustaine’s,” and contacted the band’s manager to confirm the rumor. An hour later, he received a call from Simmons himself. “There was nothing like this before,” Mustaine says. “It’s such an unfathomable concept: There was no Internet back then.”

Mustaine, who is once again planning to release a new Megadeth album, today is the focal point of an official website, megadeth.com, which contains standard features like tour dates, videos, T-shirt-selling web stores and band-member biographies. Plus social media, of course. But he retains a fondness for the denizens of Megadeth, Arizona, “If you go to Megadeth concerts and find somebody that was a member of the Megadiner,” he says, “that’s real street cred.” 

Megadeth

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