![]() But like many of her contemporaries, Stone is spending less time in the music store cashier line - and more time on-line. Stone (not her real name) is part of that 18-to-25 age bracket industry moguls covet. "You have a grass-roots movement bumping up against an industry co-opted by large, multinational corporations." "It's a revolution from the ground up," said Anthony Berman, a San Francisco entertainment attorney specializing in Internet issues. Thus, MP3 brings to the fore tensions between two different camps: Web surfers, who have traditionally regarded information in cyberspace as a free commodity, and the music industry, which has zealously protected its right to charge and collect for any use of recorded music (even songs played over a restaurant sound system). Rock album sales fell by 6 percent overall, and the study attributes the drop to several factors, most notably the rise of the Internet and MP3. Last year, Baby Boomers actually bought more albums than 15-to-24 year-olds, according to a study by the music industry's trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Though there's no money to be made by college kids giving away music, there's money to be lost when others pass on an artist's work without paying for it, industry representatives argue. These are fans out there using this MP3 format." They are not knocking off counterfeit CDs and selling them. "Pirating is not the proper term here," said Bob Kohn, chairman and founder of, an MP3 Web site based in Palo Alto, Calif. A vast majority of the so-called Internet music "pirates" aren't making money by posting their MP3 files they're just sharing their collections with other music fanatics. Some sites, such as MP3.com, average upwards of 200,000 hits a day.īut amidst all this activity, questions abound over the unlawful activity of exchanging free MP3 files by major performing artists. By some estimates, some 15 million MP3 "players" (the program that allows a listener to hear an MP3 file) have been downloaded onto computers around the world. Thus it was adopted by the Motion Picture Coding Experts Group, an international association for which MP3 is named. Although it fell short of matching CD audio, its 12-to-1 compression ratio made it ideal for saving download time and hard-drive space. It was developed by Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, a German engineer, at the Fraunhofer Institute in 1991. ![]() Compare that with the traditional major label schedule, which can stall a project for months or years, or block its release altogether.Ĭompared to the careers of some hard-luck artists, MP3 has had a relatively simple history. In the MP3 universe, a song that starts as an inspiration at breakfast can be recorded in a home studio over lunch and distributed worldwide by dinner. On the artistic end, those overlooked or discarded by the music industry - or tired of its corporate ways - sense an opportunity to reach millions of fans and potential listeners in an instant. The computer will become something of a virtual jukebox, ready to play whatever you please. On the consumer side, MP3's biggest boosters speak of a future without CD clutter or trips to the music store. "Many offices have T-1 speed Internet connections, and this makes downloading MP3 files (easy). "We receive about 250,000 daily visitors, and our traffic patterns closely mirror the traditional workday, with a spike around lunch time," said Michael Robertson, founder of the MP3.com Web site. MP3 is also taking off with office workers, many of whom have the same high-speed connections as their college counterparts. ![]() And if someone doesn't have it, you just go on the Web." "I have friends now who say that if you get access to a dorm network, you can have any song you want. "Among the people with computers and (high-speed network) access, almost everybody's into it," said Carolyn Stone, 19, a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Files can be then swapped by e-mail attachments, for example, or readily shared on a campus network. Thanks to high-tech dorms with connections that leave 56K modems in the dust, students like Gilford can download a four-minute song in seconds. If you're searching for ground zero of the MP3 explosion, look no further than the nearest college or university. But at this stage, it remains to be seen whether MP3 represents a music revolution for the masses or a novelty limited to an audience of computer geeks. Other high-profile artists have jumped into the MP3 world, including Billy Idol, Julian Lennon, Tom Petty and Soul Coughing (which offers a monthly MP3 outtake to fans via the Internet). "It'll be customary for people to say, `I just want the music and I don't need the plastic.' " "You'll see the transition (to interactive music) happen even quicker than from vinyl to CDs, between 19," said Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy.
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