Coinless JukeBox

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

While the music industry fiddles, its business is going up in flames. Given how much money is at stake--roughly $38 billion in CDs, records and cassettes each year--you'd think that someone would have reached for a hose sooner. But with the launch last week of RealNetworks' remarkably useful JukeBox--a free bit of software that makes it almost too easy to convert music CDs into pass-around computer files--my hunch is that it's already too late. I can smell the burning plastic discs from here.

The record companies have yet to agree on a standard for distributing music digitally online, but hope to have one by June. They're worried about protecting copyrights and being able to charge money for downloads. Meanwhile, the Net has already settled on a standard, called MP3, which squeezes CD-quality music into files about one-tenth their original size while retaining most of the music's high fidelity. The standard is controversial because it allows people (kids, mostly) to swap music online--piracy, the record companies charge. Yet millions do it, despite the irritating download wait of 10 min. or so per song--an annoyance that will disappear when we all get high-speed Net access. MP3 phobia is so great among record companies that Universal Records, the biggest, bolted from the pack last week and announced that it will be backing a competing standard to protect and sell online music by the end of the year.

It probably didn't help the record companies' cause that just two days before the Universal announcement, RealNetworks launched its JukeBox. RealNetworks is the biggest name in online audio (and video), bigger even than Microsoft. When it declared that JukeBox would embrace the MP3 format--allowing users to effortlessly encode their CDs in it--it was clear to me the gig was up. And to a lot of other folks too. More than 350,000 people downloaded the JukeBox software in 2 1/2 days, the fastest online "uptake" on record.

Naturally, I was among the takers who grabbed a beta copy from www.real.com Installation on my home PC was effortless. I threw a Meat Puppets CD into my disk drive and started listening to the first cut. In the time it took me to play a third of the 4-min. song, the whole tune (all 2.3 megabytes of it) was already neatly recorded and stored on my hard drive. While the sound quality is billed as "near CD," I couldn't tell the difference. I quickly set to work cherry picking our CD collection for my favorite songs. I can now play tunes from my own playlist, or randomly if I prefer. This is terrifically liberating, since it frees up my CD drive for other, uh, work.

I asked Rob Glaser, the notoriously fair-minded boss of Seattle-based RealNetworks, if he ever had any friends in the recording industry. He said he did--and still does. He claims that JukeBox won't hurt traditional recording interests and may even do good by educating people about the importance of protecting intellectual property. "People like artists," he said. Glaser points out that JukeBox comes preconfigured in an antipiracy mode that warns users not to violate copyright laws and prevents stored copies of songs from being sent from your hard drive to the Internet. Of course, you can bypass this feature by simply unchecking a preference box. I would never do that because, well, I like artists.

For more on MP3s and other music software, visit timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at [email protected]