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In a cautious move towards the computer age, the music industry is releasing
CD-ROMs from two of the world’s best-selling musicians: David Bowie and
the artist formerly known as Prince (and now as a non-ASCII squiggle).

However, record companies are still troubled by the cost and delay involved
in producing a credible CD-ROM from an artist’s album. Bowie’s CD-ROM, Jump,
had a budget of around $500 000, compared with about $200 000 for Black
Tie, White Noise, the album from which it draws its music and videos. ‘It
also took about 12 to 15 months to produce the CD-ROM once we had the storyboard,’
says David Pullen, head of the newly created multimedia division at BMG
Records. That means that the CD-ROM has appeared more than a year after
the original album. ‘One of the real problems with interactive music as
a genre is that it is very hard to get the interactive product to come out
alongside the audio one.’ Artists rarely make all the videos to accompany
songs at the same time.

Interactive, the CD-ROM by (ex-)Prince, gets around this problem by
including a number of new tracks – including the title track, which was
specially written for the new disc – and two videos created for it.

The two new products follow the few previous CD-ROM releases, including
Peter Gabriel’s Xplora (based on his album Us) and others from The Residents
and Todd Rundgren.

However, music companies are not all equally keen on CD-ROM. Only buyers
aged over 28 tend to be rich enough to own a CD-ROM player, and to pay almost
£50 for an interactive album. Sony says it has ‘no plans at present’
to release any CD-ROM music titles. At BMG, Pullen observes that ‘a lot
of artists just aren’t interested in the (CD-ROM) medium, just the audio
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