Hanson.net. I'm sure it must have seemed like a good idea to the managerial team. "The fans surf the net. Millions of fans visit the website everyday. Let's make their internet experience a Hanson experience." I still haven't looked up exactly what's involved if you make hanson.net your ISP (I barely visited the hanson.net messageboards), but I believe you get a 'Hansonized' browser, access to special content, web space and a hanson.net e-mail address.

It sounds great. Except at the moment only USA and Canadian residents will be able to sign up, and I think it will be a long time before us Australians can too, if ever. There's still no easy way for me to join MOE, resulting in me turning interesting shades of green everytime the new issue is discussed in internet circles. Except that I can't help but wonder what the motives for this marketing venture are.

Could money be involved? Surely not. After all, this IS Hanson that I'm talking about. Three fresh-faced young boys full of pure talent, who love each other and are clearly 'all about the music'. Perhaps the fiscal aspect was the executives' doing. Or maybe Hanson are extremely intelligent, enterprising boys.

Remember the 'I Will Come To You' single? The inclusion of the 'never been heard before' 'Cry' was highly hyped on their website. We all felt obliged to buy the single, if only so we could hear this exclusive track. But of course it was just a gimmick. Let's face it, as much as we love Hanson, most of us probably wouldn't have bought the single. What's the point, when you own the album? Hanson and their management realised this, and inserted 'Cry' as a neat little trick to make more people buy the single. Unfortunately it didn't work too well, at least not here in Australia.

But Hanson aren't the only ones. In a world where every pop group is a commodity and a person's success relies not on the music but on the merchandising, where you can buy Britney Spears  bubblegum and Spice Girl lunchboxes, can we blame Hanson for following the same road, albeit to a lesser extent?

Even so, I don't like to think of Hanson as such entrepreneurial sharks. Not Hanson, the boys who influenced my impressionable childish mind so much in 1997, the brothers who claim to be 'basically best friends', the ones who sing about aliens. To think this way, that the hanson.net concept is just a money-making sideline project, cheapens the image of my favourite band. So I shouldn't think like that anymore.

I'm going to go back to the way it was, when MMMBop was a novel new word, when the made-up colours of their toothbrushes were hot net news, when the word 'haircut' was a blasphemy. Perhaps I just can't accept that Hanson have changed, are changing. Maybe. But for me, it's all about the music.

Guest Editorial by Annabel