Jon Kalish - MP3: How the Internet is Changing Our Relationship to Music

Reporter: Jon Kalish member Association of Independents in Radio and National Writers Union.

INTRO:
MP3 is not a branch of British military intelligence. No, it's an audio format that is currently the rage on the Internet, allowing high-quality digital music to be copied and transported on-line with great ease. The major record companies, which have not yet jumped on the MP3 bandwagon, have taken note that people are illegally trading music on the Net. Reporter Jon Kalish, who still remembers the days of 8-track tapes, examines how MP3s are changing consumers' relationship with recorded music.

Report
If the MP3 crowd were looking for a poster boy, 26-year-old John Lee would be a good candidate. Lee is a web designer for the Comedy Central cable channel. He sits at his desk creating games and animations, a palm-pilot and cellular phone within arms reach. His 6 gigabyte hard drive holds more than 200 songs in the MP3 format. That's 12 hours of music. The list begins with the Everly Brothers and ends with Wu Tang Clan.

John Lee: I usually make a playlist of the things I wanna hear today and just let it go. Sometimes I may switch around lunch time. If I'm about to go out I put on something a little more up-tempo. I'll switch to something else whenever I'm in the mood. If I get a bad call, I'll switch to something depressing. That's the freedom that using MP3 allows me.

Lee brought his MP3 music collection in from home on a zip disk. He no longer uses a stereo system at home, where some 1,500 tunes sit on a 12-gig hard drive. There, the songs are organized in 10 different playlists that include dance music, lounge music and sing-alongs. Lee has a portable MP3 player he listens to when he runs, and he's planning to buy one of the MP3 car-players that are just hitting the market-as soon as he gets a car. Lee is clearly part of the generation that came of age in the waning days of vinyl. It's a generation that demands control over what it listens to.

John Lee: "I prefer to be able to just listen to what you want to listen to and arrange it the way you listen to it. I don't necessarily like the fact that somebody arranges the CD in an order that they think is great. I might not want to listen to it. I might like only track 13 and track 14. Maybe I want those to be track 1 and 2 and listen to those first. I like the flexibility that MP3 allows me to listen to music the way I want to listen to it.

Those of us who can remember the days when teenagers carried around a box of 45 rpm singles may chuckle at the notion that the MP3 generation doesn't want to be burdened by schlepping a lot of CDs around. MP3 people bring a portable player, which stores up to two hours of music, to a party, connect it to their host's stereo system and let it rip. Lou Dolinar is among them.

Lou Dolinar: I think MP3's are a lot more of an advance over CDs than CDs were over LPs.

Dolinar, a computer columnist with the Long Island newspaper "Newsday," agrees with industry observers who predict that the digital music revolution will result in consumers listening to and buying more music.

Lou Dolinar: The transition from LP to CD is also the transition to middle age for me. And I had sort of lost interest in music after I left college and was a young adult there for a while. I find that idea that I can take my old LPs and my new CDs and all of this stuff and sort of combine it and mix it and turn it into something that people wanna listen to at parties. You know, I'm gonna play with things like that now. I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun with it. I'm not gonna break the law, I'm not gonna steal any records. I may even buy some more CD's, jeez.

Dolinar thinks that people will scrap their stereos and start buying low-end computers instead. He also says soon people will be transferring music from their home PC to one in their car. A British company called Empeg is now selling an MP3 car player with a 28-gigabyte hard-drive that holds the equivalent of 500 albums. Or thousands of singles.

Vernon Reid is the founder of the band, Living Colour. He has mixed feelings about the way people are using the new technology. But he also criticizes the current state of the album.

Vernon Reid: I think a re-imagining of the album could be a good thing. I think albums are too long now. Like a weather report record or whatever record, you were limited to 20 minutes a side or you really had to do compression like Miles Davis and you had 30 minutes a side. But you were really limited, and that was maybe a good thing. Now you got like four tunes and 18 skits now on hip-hop records

Danny Goldberg is the former president of Atlantic and Mercury Records and is about to launch his own independent label. Goldberg takes issue with those in the record industry who vow that they will not "break up" the album format in favor of singles, acknowledging that the compilation tradition dates back to the first days of consumer reel-to-reel tape recorders. But he says that despite the demand for singles, fans will always demand an artist's long-form work.

Danny Goldberg: The core of most people's relationship to music is a relationship to artists. That's why concerts exist. That's why they organize music in record stores by artist. Artists are the heart and soul of why people love music, and artists are going to continue to connect with people and people with artists, they're going to want more than ten seconds of an artist.

The digital downloading of recorded music distributed by major record companies is likely to begin next year after the industry's so-called Secure Digital Music Initiative for copyright protection is in place. That is expected to dramatically increase the amount of music available.

For On the Media, I'm Jon Kalish, in New York.