On the Sunday Menu at Pho 87: Soup and Digital Music Technology

It’s about the unlikeliest place one could think of for a high-tech gathering, this modest Vietnamese restaurant in the shadow of Dodger Stadium. The only technology on view inside the place, known as Pho 87, is a battered Sony Trinitron TV that sits above an indoor fish pond, where 13 silver-and-orange carp swim idly about.

The first sign that something unusual is happening on a recent Sunday is the conversation. A fresh-faced 20-year-old is arguing about the relative values of “micro-payments” versus “subscription-based models” in Web commerce. He turns out to be the vice president of Scour.net, an up-and-coming Web portal company.

Rapper Ice-T’s fast-talking manager is explaining his boss’ ownership of an adult--read pornographic--Web site while using the infrared function on his Palm III to receive an electronic business card from his neighbor at the table.

Meanwhile, a 47-year-old man fresh from Jerusalem, in full beard and yarmulke, is touting the joys of Internet radio for the international set, while sampling Vietnamese iced coffee for the first time; he’s a digital copyright specialist.

On the menu are Vietnamese raw spring rolls dipped in hoisin sauce, fried spring rolls wrapped in fresh lettuce leaves and plunged in sweet vinegar sauce, and the No. 4 noodle soup with slices of rare and well-cooked beef.

But it’s the eclectic group that is its own attraction here. For every Sunday afternoon, Pho 87 plays host to one of Los Angeles’ hottest technology scenes.

To its participants, “the Sunday Pho,” named after the restaurant and its specialty noodle soup, is the best place in the world to witness the convergence of Internet technology with music and commerce. It is a freewheeling, open-invitation salon where anyone interested in the digital music revolution can come to network and float new ideas over steaming bowls of rice noodles.

The participants are talent agents, software entrepreneurs, radio and record label executives, technology consultants, music industry representatives and Web developers.

“We’re a diverse crowd,” says KROQ marketing director Stacie Siefirt, 33, one of nine women attending on a recent Sunday.

The one thing they all have in common besides an appreciation for Vietnamese food is a conviction that digital technology is revolutionizing the $38-billion-a-year music industry in ways that the rest of the world is only beginning to perceive.

At the heart of that change is online delivery of music in the form of MP3 files or other digital formats. Faster Internet connections and better compression has allowed for the widespread downloading of audiophile-quality music directly from the Internet. These music files are played through a home PC or a variety of other listening devices.

Although the impact of this kind of technology on music commerce is only beginning to be felt, the industry has long fretted that the Internet will turn compact discs into antiques and pose vexing challenges for radio, record labels and many other industry middlemen.

Of course, some see opportunity where others see catastrophe.

The “music technologists” at Pho 87 find themselves on the happy side of a major shift in power and influence charging up on the music industry. With the world’s largest entertainment and technology companies frantically partnering and jockeying for the lead in digital delivery, those who have a grasp of Internet technology have emerged as oracles and gurus, possessing the keys to the industry’s future.

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And that’s where the Sunday Pho comes in--serving as a social bridge between the tech and music communities.

“This is where new media and traditional media are meeting,” says Jason Droege, Scour.net’s vice president of business development. “And you get a lot of people representing the artists too, which is important because the old media often made the mistake of leaving them out.”

It may be a convergence better suited to Los Angeles than anywhere else.

“Northern California has more hard-core technology companies, but music technology is more scene-based,” Droege says. “You couldn’t have the same cross-fertilization up there because the artist management and music company people wouldn’t come.”

“You get a good mix of gossip and useful information,” agrees Jed Stafford, 24, network architect for Checkout.com, an e-commerce site for music, videos and computer games. “People throw out ideas and get tons of useful feedback.”

By the time the food arrives, only the strong-lunged can be heard over the clanging of plates and simultaneous conversations. But Jim Griffin, 41, the jocular host whose consulting company picks up the tab at the end of the afternoon, is joking about the practice of e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and CDNow making recommendations to customers based on previous purchases.

“I can’t wait until Rx.com starts doing that,” Griffin says to knowing laughter. “‘People who’ve taken Prozac also enjoyed Zoloft, St. John’s wort and Deepak Chopra.”’

Lightly graying around the temples, with square glasses and a green safari shirt tucked neatly into black shorts, Griffin is more tech guru than music industry heavyweight. But as one of Internet music’s leading evangelists, he is perennially included among the magazine BAM’s 100 most influential people in music. When he helped create Geffen Records’ technology department six years ago, he helped pioneer the distribution of entertainment on the Internet. Griffin has since left Geffen to form his own consulting company, OneHouse.

“If they would have let the technology department do whatever we wanted, Geffen would be a $5-billion company by now,” Griffin laughs. (Instead, Geffen Records was absorbed last December into Seagram Co.’s Interscope division, following a long streak of sluggish sales.)

As the conversation turns back to the relationship between artists and the consumers who buy their work, Griffin seems satisfied that the Internet is on the verge of perfecting music commerce.

“Those who provide music and those who love music are finally developing the kind of straight-line relationship that they’ve always wanted with each other,” he says. And fortunately for this crew, that straight line appears to run right through Pho 87.