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The lengths to which some people will go for free music. Perched on a bunk in a dorm room at a Southern California university, freshman Paul Smith (not his real last name), is doing something naughty — and no, it's not that. After clicking on his computer, this Lara Croft-lovin' tech-head connects to a website filled with hardcore porn to find a secret password he's been told is buried there. With this open sesame, he'll gain entry into the real treasure chest: a website jammed with illegal MP3s — files of digital music that can be downloaded for his listening pleasure.
''A lot of the MP3s I have are one-hit wonders like 'Come on Eileen,''' he explains. ''Dexy's Midnight Runners! Heard of any other songs by them? No. So why buy a CD for $15 when I want [just] one song?'' Paul's MP3 stash is a veritable K-Tel collection: more than 500 tunes, from rock to folk to Christian. Most every song is a bootleg (illegal copies of copyrighted songs, passed from one person to the next), which means this college student has broken copyright laws hundreds of times since he began amassing MP3s a year ago.
It's important to note that MP3 technology itself is not illegal, nor are many of its applications. In fact, Tom Petty recently put a single from his upcoming Warner Bros. album on MP3.com, one of the primary legitimate websites for MP3 music. (See below for an example of how you can use MP3 to copy legally available music.)
But here's the problem: The way in which most Web-savvy music fans are using this technology blatantly violates copyright law — and that's throwing the $12 billion recording industry into turmoil. How the labels tackle this dilemma could change how you buy and listen to tunes in the next century.
Picking up where the CD boom left off, MP3 is ''the biggest thing to happen in the business in about 40 years,'' says Paul Vidich, senior VP of strategic planning for Warner Music Group. Not that music executives are happy about it: They must now find a way to enforce copyrights and keep ahead of technology — or face becoming the Dexys of the digital future.
''If I ran a label, I'd be terrified,'' says techno-star Moby. Industry execs admit MP3 has caught everyone asleep at the CD changer. ''There's no question the music fan beat the industry to music online,'' concedes Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). ''Now [we're] trying to catch up.''
Invented in 1991 at the Fraunhofer Institute, a German audio research lab, MP3 (short for MPEG-1 Layer-3 — sorry you asked, huh?) is a compression technology that makes files of CD-quality sound. Enterprising college students were among MP3's earliest pioneers, attracted by the flexibility of the format (you can sequence your own playlists) and the great sound. With time on their hands and fast-moving T1 lines at their disposal, they turned their computers into virtual jukeboxes, making MP3s of live performances, swapping music, and establishing bootleg websites.
