Free Music Online

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I have seen the death of the recording industry: its name is MP3. Now, I should admit that my death notices have been notoriously premature. At various times in my crystal-ball-gazing career, I have predicted that the Internet would knock dead newspapers, magazines, TV, the U.S. political system and America Online--all enterprises that are apparently healthy. So far. But this time I mean it. Never mind what the abbreviation stands for; MP3 refers to a technology that allows you to squeeze CD-quality music down to less than a tenth of its digital size, while retaining virtually all of its lovely sound. That makes it small enough to send to anyone online--which is exactly what's happening.

Some 3 million people have downloaded MP3 players from such sites as www.winamp.com (The player is the software program that allows you to listen to MP3-encoded music, and a dozen different flavors are available, free, for PCs, Macs and UNIX machines.) Countless search engines like mp3search.com are devoted to finding the vast archives of MP3 music that exist online. A lot of the music, from the Beatles to Beethoven, is on underground "pirate" sites, which specialize in the illegal practice of giving away copyrighted music. The recording industry employs an army whose job it is to root out pirate sites--tough work since some archives spring up for only days or hours at a time. (Note: while it's technically illegal to download copyrighted music, this prohibition is no easier to enforce than the one against videotaping baseball games.)

The MP3 craze is only going to get wilder: last week Diamond Multimedia of San Jose, Calif., announced it will ship hardware next month that plays MP3 recordings. The $199 device, called Rio, is as small as a deck of cards and plugs into your PC, where you can fill it up with an hour's worth of tunes that you've downloaded. Then you can detach it and take it anywhere.

I learned of the MP3 phenomenon when Jonathan Clenman, a tech guy in my office, took me over to his PC recently and showed me what I've been missing. He had more than 160 songs on his computer, which was playing like a juke box, pumping out music whose quality was so good, I couldn't differentiate it from a CD player. "This is the end of the recording industry!" I shrieked. Clenman sighed. "I doubt it," he said.

He put me in touch with Christopher Sabec, a music agent who happened to discover teen-rock idols the brothers Hanson. Sabec believes that far from being the music industry's undoing, MP3 will be a boon. The recording industry has always made a profit by giving away product for free," Sabec pointed out, mentioning radio as the obvious example. He said lots of savvy bands are already using the technology to put free music samples online legally. The gambit especially works for folks trying to break into the music biz who are eager to get radio airtime. In fact, a new band that he represents, Swirl360--pop rockers who are 23-year-old identical twins--released a few MP3 songs online at swirl360.com last week. "We think of it as an advertisement," Sabec added. Besides, while it's possible to download a band's entire CD, it takes too long--on a 56.6K modem, figure 10 minutes a song. So maybe the recording industry isn't dead. Yet.

For more on MP3s, see time.com/personal on the Web. See Josh or Anita Hamilton on CNNfn Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. E.T. E-mail Josh at [email protected]