When CDs Go the Way of Antiques:
Lessons from Two Weeks of Listening Online

by Neil Strauss, The New York Times

I've been spending a lot of time crawling around on my hands and knees lately.

The reason is a self-assigned experiment: to spend two weeks listening only to music streamed or downloaded from the Internet. These were not consecutive weeks. The first took place last winter, just before a United States Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's ruling ordering Napster to halt unauthorized exchange of copyrighted songs. The second took place a few weeks ago, in a post-Napster online universe.

I had been listening to music online for years, but only as a supplement to my CD collection and the radio. Now I wanted to make the Internet my jukebox. This was not to see if it was possible (for some, traditional CD's already seem like antiques), but to see how it changed the experience of listening to music. After all, it is an old chestnut of cultural theory that society is shaped more by the media that transmit information than by the information itself.

As a critic whose job is based on listening to new music, I have never been exposed to more high-quality artists in a shorter amount of time. Any musicians complaining about song-sharing services like Napster, any record executives trying to work out an Internet business model, and any fans who wants a glimpse of the way music consumption and distribution will change in the future should put aside their stereos and try this experiment first.

The requirements are simple: a decent computer, a pair of speakers, a portable MP3 player (for listening to downloaded music outside and in the car), and a dedicated high-speed link to the Internet for fast downloads.

One thing to be learned is that the popularity of Napster and other music file-sharing services stems from one of the main problems of the current record industry: people want to consume more music than they can afford. And, online, to quote a Robert Earl Keen song I downloaded, ''The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.''

In the first days, I immersed myself in a maze-like world, with each song a forking corridor leading to another forking corridor. Listening to an unreleased song by the parody-rock group Tenacious D on Napster, called ''Tribute to the Best Song in the World,'' I was inspired to download songs that it reminded me of, including ''Devil Went Down to Georgia'' by the Charlie Daniels Band and ''The Ride'' by David Allan Coe. Those songs, in turn, inspired me to listen to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, which led me to search for obscure sides by the 1920's country star Vernon Dalhart and the devilish bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw -- but he didn't have any songs on Napster, thus blowing the claim that every popular recording in history lay therein. (In week two, however, I found a dozen Peetie Wheatstraw songs on a Napster clone, Aimster.)

Not too long ago, the wry Scottish songwriter Momus came up with his own twist on Andy Warhol's aphorism, claiming that in the future, everyone will be famous not for 15 minutes but to 15 people. That exaggeration was the essence of listening to music online for me: It was all about discovering new artists (many without record deals); about typing in a single word to unearth every single piece of music that contains that word; about twisting through Web pages, links and file downloads to stumble upon just the right new song.

Because most file-sharing programs work like a standard Internet search engine, displaying all songs that contain a certain word, the nature of browsing is changing: a teenager looking for the Shaggy hit ''Angel'' may come across the Sarah McLachlan or Jimi Hendrix song of the same name, and get turned on to a different genre of music.

As the Week 1 progressed, it became clear how the different way one apprehends music online is likely to change the nature of music making. If the long-playing record brought about a culture in which musicians aspire to the full-length album as their ultimate creative expression, then the Internet promises to return us to a world in which the song stands alone. As a result, the process of promoting music will change. If a band wants to call attention to itself in the retail world, it does so with eye-catching CD covers, displays and advertisements; but in the online universe ruled by the search engine, song titles are key. If a young band wants to reach a wide audience, the smartest thing it could do would be to give one of its songs a title similar to that of a current hit. Then, when users of a file-swapping service search for Usher's ''U Remind Me,'' they'll stumble across a song of the same title by the new band as well. Actually, with Napster not currently functioing and most of the substitutes offering software and film downloads as well, it might be a better idea to name that new song after a video game or dirty movie.

I also discovered new music through the simplest way of listening to music online: streaming radio, which involved simply heading to a site like www.shoutcast.com or the home page of a favorite radio station and listening to the live broadcast. At www.billboard.com, I checked in on the hits by listening to a Top 40 countdown; at www.drugmusic.com, I drifted off to sleep to a program of droning psychedelic rock; at phusion.fromdj.com, I received my hip-hop fix with D.J. mix tapes; and at www.radioparadise.com, a personal favorite, I spent hours listening to the type of music that regularly makes critics' Top 10 lists (from artists like Radiohead, Nick Drake, Bjork, Randy Newman and Lucinda Williams).

More importantly, listening to these music streams was a way to nationalize local radio and catch up with some favorite college stations, like WFMU-FM in East Orange, N.J., for independent, hard-to-find new music; WNUR-FM in Evanston, Ill., a station I grew up with; and CKUT-FM in Montreal, one of the best places to hear experimental radio plays and sound art. And in a nice change from most home radio reception, all these small-wattage stations were received with a clear signal.

Later in the first week, when I had more time to spend on my computer, I tried to go to authorized download sites that ranged from the home pages of MP3-friendly bands like Less Than Jake and the Beastie Boys to sites like www.listen.com and the more alternative www.epitonic.com, both of which are filled with promotional song downloads, streaming radio stations and music videos.

In general, it seemed to be a rule that the more passwords you needed, the more personal information you had to submit, the more corporate logos you saw and the more special software you needed to download, the worse the site was. At www.live 365.com, for example, I gave the site all sorts of information, from my zip code to my email address in order to gain access to the streaming radio there. Afterwards, I still wasn't allowed to enter the site: I had to wait to receive a confirmation of my membership in my email in-box. Once at the site, I wasn't allowed to log in unless I allowed it to store invasive Web-usage-tracking cookies on my computer. My patience, however, ended when the site would not let me progress further unless I downloaded its own radio-listening software. It was too easy to get better music elsewhere. Suddenly, the popularity of Internet music services independent of the industry and the stock market made sense in comparison with the commercial alternative.

In light of a mostly successful, largely pain-free first week, I worried about the second week of the experiment, especially with Napster no longer functioning. The search for a reasonable Napster substitute, however, became one of my most simultaneously exciting and frustrating Internet experiences. Every day, a friend or relative turned me on to a new program, and I obediently downloaded Bearshare, WinMX, LimeWire, Audiogalaxy, iMesh, CuteFTP, Morpheus and more. In my first days, I settled on Aimster, a cocky Napster clone, as a favorite. Its interface was similar to Napster's, and its selection was good. But there were a few inconveniences that didn't seem to occur on Napster: searches for music often ended up retrieving other types of files, from promotional photos to pornography; sometimes a dozen other users were waiting in line to download the same track; and many songs were delivered incomplete.

Tired of the long lines and big gaps in content, I searched for a good program to run in combination with Aimster. I turned to one of the original sources of file sharing -- person-to-person chat programs -- and downloaded one called mIRC. Though getting hold of music through this chat program involved typing long strings of commands, there was something about mIRC that was more exciting than Napster. It required direct participation in the process: communicating with other users, downloading their play lists and typing out actual requests for the files from their computers. By combining Aimster, mIRC, and a third, lesser-known but extremely easy-to-use program called KazaA, I was not only able to find most of what I was looking for, I now also had the ability to download videos, live performances and films. As a result, I spent more time online, but downloaded fewer files, in part because there is not yet another single file-transfer program attracting the 50-million-plus users that Napster did.

During this experiment, I happened to have conversations with two musicians, both of whom have had No. 1 albums. And both were so passionate, to the point of tears, in complaining about the royalties that they were being robbed of by file-sharing services. Even several musicians who support Napster publicly said to me in private that they were against the service (but smart enough not to alienate fans by saying so on the record). It seems strange, however, that with musicians shortchanged in so many ways and having so much money withheld by record companies, publishers, managers, lawyers and other middlemen, they are only mad at their fans.

It is an accepted practice in the business for record companies to manufacture thousands of promotional CD's and cassette samplers that are given away free and for which the artists receive no royalties. An argument could easily be made that, for a large segment of file-sharing service users, the downloads are promotional. For music fans who have never heard of Ex Number Five or Kid Dynamite (two punk bands whose songs I had never heard until I downloaded them), stumbling across a track and downloading it may mean they're initially shorting these independent musicians a few pennies. But now, suddenly, an artist they've never heard of has become a commodity to them: if they like the band, they'll go to shows, buy T-shirts, tell their friends and perhaps even purchase the actual CD.

''I don't know why everybody is so upset by Napster,'' said Jenna Washer, an advertising executive I talked to during my first week without CD's. ''I have to say that I've actually doubled my CD purchasing since I started using it. I think it's sad that the music industry doesn't realize it's free advertising.''

Of course, the record-industry fear is that one day online music will be less promotional for CD's and more competitive with them, and so consumers can't be allowed to just have it all free. Thus, they have been gearing up to start monthly music subscription services, much like cable television services. But one hitch in this plan is that the popular hardware has not yet caught up to the popular software. That is why I spent so much time on my hands and knees during these two weeks: between constant interruptions in my high-speed Internet connection and the awkward location in most desktop computers of ports for attaching supplemental hardware, I was constantly crawling around behind my desktop to troubleshoot, update equipment and transfer songs onto a portable MP3 player.

The truth is that my experiment wasn't a complete success: three days into my first week online in Los Angeles, I lost my Verizon high-speed service. A service phone call was not returned for four days. When my connection was up and running again, it only lasted a day before the service cut out again. Finally, after a few more lost connections, I made it through the first week. Switching to a cable provider for the second week provided marginally better results.

So, after my weeks without CD's, I can see the future. I can even experience the future -- but it's still the future. However, if that future looks anything like Napster once did, I'm ready and waiting; if it looks like the restrictive radio site live365.com, however, I'll stick to my CD collection.

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Neil Strauss is a music critic for the New York Times. This article ran in the Aug. 20, 2001, edition of the Times.

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