Home Music Network

By Marie D'Amico, 

Hate to go shopping? For years, we’ve been able to avoid the malevolent mall and purchase clothing at home from a whole series of what Garry Trudeau calls J. Pretentious catalogs. Some of these catalogs are now available on-line through electronic mail services. But, until recently, if you wanted to buy music and didn’t want to get sucked into the Columbia House scam, you still needed to go to the record store. No more. The Home Music Network is here.

If you want to purchase either domestic or imported CD’s and have them shipped to you from the comfort of your Lay-Z-Boy, you can now do so via cdconnection.com or cdeurope.com . These services, which are provided free of access charges through Telnet, allow you to peruse reviews, current sales, BillBoard’s list , and more. But, if you’re not sure what you want to buy and you would like a little sample, that’s also available through a wide variety of sources.

The Internet Underground Music Archive ( IUMA ) contains videos, band biographies, photos, club dates, newsletters, 30 second sound samples, and entire songs from relatively unknown bands. You can help a struggling songwriter and save the environment by downloading a song and reducing the number of unrecyclable plastic jewel boxes. Generally however, you cannot listen to established bands on IUMA. On the Beastie Boys page in Mosaic, I found the following: "Due to potential problems of legality, I will not be digitizing songs from Beastie Boys albums for retrieval from this site."

In addition to IUMA, there are bands and even a label which allow you to download their songs in other areas of the net. Under the W3 catalog, the San Francisco-based label "N-Fusion" has samples from their most recent CD on the net. Bands like Towhead , Deth Specula , Eden Retread , and Mr. Paul have placed what appear to be their entire song sets on the net. And, under Adam Curry ’s Recording Studio (not to be confused with MTV.com who is suing him, see MTV sues for ex-VJ's Internet address, Vol. 4, No.1 ), I found cuts from albums by Atlantic , Island , PolyGram , Zoo Entertainment , and more.

Aerosmith and Geffen Records have gone one step further from sound bytes and, as of June 27, 1994, made available via CompuServe an entire song called "Head First" a cut left off their multimillion selling new album Get a Grip . The group is waiving all royalties for the song and CompuServe is waiving connect-time charges to download the 4.3 megabyte file, which will take about 60 to 90 minutes, depending upon the speed of your modem (14.4 or 9.6 kbs). While the song will only be distributed in the U.S. via electronic mail, making it potentially a collector’s item, a spokesman at Collins Management for Aerosmith stated that it was also available on the B side of a single in some areas of Europe.

Downloading and listening to these samples and songs is a bit like ordering clothes from the Victoria’s Secret catalog. The articles are nice but they never look the same on you as they do on those models. To download a song, you need to have lots of extra time to tie up your computer. I have a 56K line to my house and it took over 10 minutes to download a 2.7 megabyte song file. That’s too long and costly for me. If you want to play the song, you should own a Macintosh. The instructions to play a sound file on a Macintosh are: "Use Sound Machine." The instructions to play a sound file on a Windows machines are three paragraphs long with phrases like ‘486, 50 Megahertz, CD-compatible Labtec speakers, and "some interesting results".

And the sound quality? Well, as Mr. Paul who has placed his music on the net says, "songs were recorded by running a microphone from Mike’s bathroom to his Mac". They all sound like it. Remember, CD quality music is digitized at 44 Khz, 16 bit. Music placed on the net is usually digitized at 8 khz, 8 bit and that’s what gives it that portable AM radio with a blown speaker sound.

All this worries both artists, music retailers, and music publishers who are afraid of losing royalties. And, where there’s fear, there’s lawyers. MEDIA , the Musician’s Electronic Distribution Industry Association, has already been formed to make sure "artists don’t get screwed over". A class action suit against CompuServe by music publishers for copyright infringement has already been filed. It seems CompuServe subscribers have been uploading and others have been downloading copyrighted music. But, as a lawyer, I am quite confident that everything will be resolved so that users get music and publishers get money. After all, that’s what we get paid for.

Questions? Send me email .

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© 2006 Digital Media