DIGITAL L.A. : AOL'S ENTRY INTO INTERNET MUSIC QUICKENS THE TEMPO.

Byline: David Bloom 

Last fall and winter, we ran a series of stories about what the Internet was doing to the music business, as bands and labels started using it to sell their music, college kids used it to pirate their favorite tunes, and fans of radio used it to bypass that medium's limits of time, distance, money and licensing.

Since then, things have gotten crazy. Both the recording industry and major players such as IBM and Microsoft have joined the fray, facing a slew of new and established smaller Net-only companies, all trying to get a piece of the business of moving music over the Internet.

The latest gorilla to jump into this jungle was AOL, which announced this week that it is buying both Spinner.com and Nullsoft.

Spinner, one of the more interesting Internet ``radio'' sites (at www.spinner.com), uses streaming audio to let you custom create playlists from the kinds of music you want to hear.

Nullsoft mostly works the other side of the online music, with its Winamp program, which lets you download and listen to music encoded in MP-3, the Internet's favorite audio compression format.

The interest and cold cash of the Net's biggest real-estate owner should further accelerate music's move online. It also has interesting implications for one of those small, established companies mentioned earlier, like MusicMatch Inc. in San Diego, whose top officials stopped by for a visit just as the AOL purchases were being announced.

The company makes the MusicMatch Jukebox, which strives to be the MP-3 Swiss Army knife, and competes partially with Winamp. So far theirs has been a friendly enough competition.

MusicMatch bills the jukebox as the best-selling MP-3 software in the world (though its basic version is now given away), and it is bundled with two of the first portable MP-3 players, Diamond's Rio and Creative Technology's Nomad.

Jukebox will play CDs in your computer, create MP-3 files from those discs or many other audio sources, organize the files with a sophisticated array of filters, and put them into playlists that you can invoke for different situations and moods.

``Our goal was to turn the PC into the coolest part of a stereo system,'' said CEO Dennis Mudd, a Wharton grad who spent a dozen years with Hewlett-Packard before starting MusicMatch.

Mudd's not doing too badly: 1 million copies of Jukebox are downloaded each month, with an estimated 3.5 million ``active'' users. The company brings in nearly $1 million a month and is making a profit, he said.

The numbers looked good enough that yet another kiloton-sized gorilla, German electronics giant Thomson Electronics, recently bought 20 percent of the company for undisclosed terms. Thomson is best-known in this country for owning RCA, but not incidentally, it is co-holder of the patent for MP-3 compression.

The beta version of Jukebox 4.0 has been available (at www.musicmatch.comjukebox) for about a month and is about to reach its final release version.

It allows you to radically customize your player's look;make good-quality recordings (you can upgrade to a ``gold version'' that allows CD-quality recordings at sampling rates that are three times higher); and recording tools such as fade control and 12-channel recording. Expect a Macintosh version of the software this summer, Mudd said.

The sophisticated recording tools are there, in part, because Mudd believes that in three years, we'll have a very different array of stereo equipment than now, and at its center will be a computer.

``I believe the computer will become a key tool to find and play music,'' Mudd said. ``It probably won't look a lot like a PC, it'll probably be part of a stereo rack.''

I'm betting he's right. Here's a scenario to ponder in coming months and years: Take those snazzy programmable remote-control devices coming out now to run your home theater and stereo system. Cross that with whatever they'll call the Palm Pilot in a couple of generations (the Palm VII already has limited wireless Web connectivity).

The result? A handheld machine that runs everything at the touch of a virtual button, and finds the music on the Net you want, whether it's digital ``radio'' or downloads that you can store on that massive next-generation Tivo media player. And when you leave the house, the handheld will take the tunes with you. There's a business plan.

And speaking of MP-3, the site that has championed the format most loudly will be holding a big confab June 14-15 in San Diego on the future of music on the Internet. Go to MP3.com at www.mp3.com for more information.

Led by Michael Robertson, MP3.com's brash and pugnacious CEO, the conference should have some substantial entertainment value, if nothing else. Despite MP-3's copyright protection problems, it's starting to stick in a lot of places, so this conference should be a good place to get a sense of what's going on.

DVD `Dreams'

Polygram Video's new DVD release of ``What Dreams May Come,'' the sumptuous effects-laden romance of last year, comes with some nifty extras for folks with the right equipment.

As befits a film that won an Oscar for best visual effects, the DVD includes commentary from both the director and the visual-effects supervisor on how they created the Boschian images of heaven and hell that comprise so much of the film, and a ``making of'' documentary on the film's production challenges.

It also includes an alternate ending to the film, something you may see in more and more films on DVD (see if those marketing mavens and test audiences were right the first time). And for people with DVD-ROM players on their computer, the disc includes desktop images or wallpaper for both Macs and PCs.

The DVD also comes with many of the standard extras, such as cast and crew information, production notes, the theatrical trailers and a photo gallery of set designs and behind-the-scenes shots.

Another welcome addition to the DVD world is Columbia's collector's edition of ``Taxi Driver,'' the great 1976 Martin Scorsese film featuring Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd and an adolescent Jodie Foster.

The dual-layer disc comes with remastered audio and video, the celebrated screenplay by Paul Schrader, storyboards, a photo gallery and all the usual other odds and ends.

Kickin' it

The U.S. Soccer Federation is trying to boost television viewership through the Web, particularly in this year where the American team is a favorite to win the women's World Cup competition. Register at the USSF's Web site (www.us-soccer.com) and the federation will send e-mail reminders of upcoming televised matches of the U.S. men's and women's national teams, and inside info on the players and coaches involved. This sort of approach will soon be common, I'm betting, for lots of entertainment organizations trying to build close relationships with fans of their teams, bands and other kinds of performers.