DIGITAL REVOLUTION; INTERNET BECKONS TO CD, RADIO CONSUMERS.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

A week before their 30th wedding anniversary, a man decides to give his wife a personalized collection of the songs they listened to when they first met. With a few clicks on a Web site, he compiles a custom CD, picks the song order, titles and decorates the disc, and pays for it. By the time of the celebration they're dancing to the CD.

Elsewhere, the world's greatest bar band rolls into town. The nightclub's sound man plugs a cable into the mixing board, sending a live feed from the concert onto the Internet, giving anyone with a computer and a connection a prime seat as the band sizzles through three sets.

After the show, band members tell newly converted fans their Web site address. At the site, the faithful can check tour dates, buy the band's music and T-shirts, listen to live recordings, and hook up with other like-minded listeners.

While the talk has been about television and the computer,the Internet and the digital revolution behind it are turning the music world on its ear. Internet ``radio'' services, for instance, offer genres of music never heard on a broadcast station, while other sites feature jam sessions and live concerts, broader visibility for unsigned bands or the chance to rediscover long-out-of-print music by better-known artists.

But for every new winner in a revolution, there's an old loser. Record company and retail store executives are worried about losing money to online competitors and to piracy as note-perfect illegal copies can be shipped in a heartbeat around the world.

On the other hand, they reason, there's nothing stopping them from cashing in - if they can just figure out how.

``It's not going to happen by itself, but musicians have to realize we're in a digital age,'' said Wendy Hafner, Intel Corp.'s director of music marketing. ``One hundred million PCs will be shipped this year all over the world. It's a huge, huge opportunity for the music business to take advantage of.''

A need for speed

The explosion in Internet music the past year has been driven by a series of improvements in technology: faster Internet connections, better compression programs and players, higher-quality computer sound cards and speakers. The result is sound quality at least as good as FM radio and approaching that of CDs, with access to a dizzying variety of music.

``One of the things I enjoy about working in this field is how quickly things have progressed,'' said Nicholas Wild, director of technology at the House of Blues new media division, which Netcasts three live concerts and up to 10 album ``listening'' parties every week. ``When I started first using the Net, I was downloading text. Now you see video getting integrated into Web sites.''

To keep ahead of the changes, the House of Blues is installing full digital production studios at all six of its clubs so it can easily create broadcast-quality concert videos anywhere, Wild said. For all its quick adoption of technology, it still may not be able to keep pace with all the changes, company executives say.

On Web sites like MusicMaker.com, a visitor can page through more than 100,000 legally licensed tracks by a wide range of artists, pick out favorites and have the Internet company create a made-to-order CD.

Other sites will sell a legal, digital copy of music that will play on their computer using technology such as Liquid Audio or A2B that encrypt the music so it can't be duplicated. And if they have a recordable CD drive, they can even create their own custom CDs with the music.

``We have an opportunity to re-create some of the magic of the 1950s, when you had a hit single and could break a record in a region,'' said David Kessel, a musician and CEO of the Internet Underground Music Archive, whose Web site features music by and information on unsigned bands.

Online gives radio a boost

``Radio'' has blossomed on the Internet, too, including Net-only music programmers - such as Spinner.com in Burlingame - that don't even broadcast over the airwaves.

Spinner, for instance, slices more than 100,000 tracks of music into 104 genres, including many that just can't be found in American broadcast radio.

``You're not going to go to any market in this country and get a Delta blues format, or a Celtic format, or an all-Baroque format,'' said Scott Epstein, Spinner's vice president for marketing and content.

Epstein said the Internet has fast become a home for music for three simple reasons: ``control, variety and simplicity.'' For the first time, music fans can easily decide when they want to listen to their favorite kinds of music.

``Forget having four or five rock stations in a market,'' said music consultant Ted Cohen. ``You're going to have hundreds or thousands of choices.''

And even more musical choices will abound when record labels start putting their massive back catalogs of out-of-print music into digital format and make it available for purchase online, Cohen said.

Such an approach solves the industry's unwillingness to print CDs of old music, only to have it gather dust on warehouse shelves, while allowing fans to custom create CDs of their own design, Cohen said.

Technology and its discontents

Music industry leaders acknowledge digital music's many possibilities, but cite some deep concerns in the next breath.

``We're excited about the technology,'' said Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. ``Fifty thousand albums are released a year. We know there's a lot of great music out there that consumers can't get to. The next three to four years provides amazing opportunities for individual labels and groups that radio has ignored.''

Sites like Kessel's IUMA, Scour.net and the Ultimate Band List already provide fans with ready access to thousands of bands whose music they otherwise might never hear.

``It's going to allow people more information about every single piece of music product they can get their hands on,'' said Tom Roli, publisher of the online magazine WebNoize, which will sponsor a three-day seminar on digital music in Universal City in November.

``It's an opportunity for a rebirth of the music industry,'' Roli said. ``It's the best thing for everybody, demand programming. What you want when you want it.''

But Greene and others in the record business fret over piracy - illegal, high-quality copies of music that can be easily duplicated and distributed through the multiplicative magic of a wired world.

``From an intellectual property perspective, all of our traditional concerns are multiplied by a thousand on the cyberfrontier,'' Greene said. ``As (Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder) John Perry Barlow put it, we are used to protecting not the wine, but the bottle it comes in. So what happens now that we are selling wine with no bottles?''

Avast! Pirates ahead

People like Greene are afraid of people like Chris Ward of Valencia, a Northwestern University student and big fan of the MP-3 computer audio format, which creates a high-quality, highly compressed file that can be easily stored or transferred over the Internet.

College students in particular use freely available software to encode a standard CD song into the MP-3 format on their computers. Hundreds of sites have copies of illegal MP-3s available for downloading, which takes seconds on a college campus' high-speed Internet connection.

Ward paid for none of the 50 MP-3 songs on his computer, but says he wouldn't have bothered to buy most of them otherwise. He did find MP-3s of a new favorite band, Guster, that in turn led him to buy a CD of the band he didn't already have.

``The thing I like is you can decide you like a song, spend maybe 10 minutes on the Web looking for it and if you can find it, great. If not, OK,'' Ward said.

To stamp out access to illegal MP-3s, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) uses automated software that snoops through the Internet looking for sites offering hundreds of illegal songs each, said Brandy Thomas, whose Virginia company, Online Monitoring Services, does the cyber-sleuthing for the RIAA, the Association of Songwriters, Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) and other large entertainment organizations.

Once found, large sites' owners face legal action and shutdown, Thomas said. Those threats have driven most of the big pirate sites underground.

ASCAP, which represents about half of all music publishers and songwriters, is more concerned about getting sites to pay license fees than stop using music, Thomas said. His company's software will issue licenses to Web sites using ASCAP-owned music, and set up a billing process.

Either way, Thomas said, it helps ensure people in the music business still have a business.

``That's our main concern, retention of all rights,'' said producer Jeffrey Weber, co-owner of a small Beverly Hills label, Weberworks. ``We spend a lot of money making music. We don't want people getting it for free.''

A marketing bonanza

At the same time, many bands are giving music away on the Internet, or at least samples of it. That makes it easier to get noticed, though it doesn't guarantee success, some in the business point out.

``We're reducing the barriers of entry, but once you're in, it's the equivalent to being the opening slot of a 10-band bill,'' said Cohen. ``If you just hang your shingle up and say, `Hi, I'm here,' it's the equivalent of playing in a parking lot in the middle of Nebraska.''

Anthony Stonefield of Global Music Outlet, a Culver City company that sells music online, said getting known is still a challenge, but ``the Internet is like a living color brochure for a band.''

Even some notable musicians and bands are using the Net to promote their music or reward loyal fans. Beastie Boys, Hole, Live, Massive Attack, and Jesus and Mary Chain have given away tracks in recent months through the Internet.

And Frank Black, a former member of the Pixies, is selling his entire new album, ``Frank Black and the Catholics,'' on the Internet through Goodnoise, a new Palo Alto-based label dedicated to selling music in digital form.

``It's giving people instant access to what they want,'' Cohen said. ``We've been at the mercy of whoever's programming our life. The whole thing is to turn people on to music. I don't know of anything else that's come along that could do that.''

WEB WATCH

Here's more information about the Web sites mentioned in the story:

CDnow (www.cdnow.com) and Music Boulevard (www.musicblvd.com) offer hundreds of thousands of CDs for online purchase, as do Tower Records (www.towerrecords.com) and Borders (www.borders.com). Consumer alert: Shop around, because prices vary widely.

The Music Connection (www.musicmaker.com) has 100,000 tracks licensed from a broad range of performers, though mostly such things as jazz and blues. Mix and match the music you want and they'll create the compact disc of your dreams.

Internet Underground Music Archive (www.iuma.com) was a pioneer in offering no-name bands a home on the Internet, with song samples, band information and more, while the Ultimate Band List (www.ubl.com) is a more comprehensive successor to IUMA, with tons of other band information, music and more.

Scour (www.scour.net) bills itself as the first multimedia search engine, so you can look specifically for audio, video and graphics files. You can even search by file format.

MP3.com (www.mp3.com) aims to be the one-stop shop for the MP-3 computer audio format, with links and ratings of software to create, catalog and listen to MP-3s as well as how-to guides, a search engine and more.

The House of Blues Web site (www.liveconcerts.com) offers live concert recordings, pre-release ``listening parties'' of many new albums, interviews with prominent musicians and much more. It also has a rich archive with hundreds of previous concerts.

Web music magazine/consultant/marketer WebNoize (www.webnoize.com) covers the digital music world exclusively, and is sponsoring a three-day seminar on the business in Universal City in November.

Global Music Outlet (www.globalmusic.com) helps bands get online, creating sites, encoding music and selling it to fans.

Spinner (www.spinner.com) offers 100,000 different tracks divided into 104 narrow genres. This is a godsend for workplace drones with high-speed Internet connections. Exactly the music you want, while you work. This is modern living.

The All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com) features hundreds of thousands of reviews, and suggestions for albums by other artists that you might also enjoy. And you can help rate albums, too. Amazing site.

- David Bloom

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Taking note of the net

Computers are turning the music world on its ear

Photo illustration by Myung J. Chun and Dionisio Munoz/Daily News

(2) With more than 100,000 titles in its catalog, the MusicMaker.com Web site can create a CD of personal favorites for an online customer.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News

Box: WEB WATCH (See Text)