The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Listening Boom : Music-Oriented Sites Lead the World Wide Web Hit Parade

Ian Rogers was winding up his college days and suffering from a bout of senioritis when, to pass the time, he added a page to the World Wide Web about one of his favoritebands, the Beastie Boys. As the weeks passed, Rogers added more to the Internet site--a news nugget one day, a digitized photo the next.

Then he got a call from the rap group’s management team. Rogers was afraid they would try to shut him down. After all, like most people who start up sites on the Web--the easy-to-use graphical portion of the Internet--he was posting copyrighted material such as song lyrics and album covers without permission from the powers that be.

Instead, the Beastie Boys hired him and fellow Indiana University undergrad Mark Thompson to update and maintain the Web site (html://www.nando.net/GrandRoyal). The pair even spent six weeks on tour with the band, making daily updates to the site from the road.

That all began in the spring of 1994, when World Wide Web sites were a mystery to all but the Internet literati. “When I did the Beastie Boys site, there really weren’t that many,” Rogers said. “Now it seems there’s a site for every band out there.”

Indeed, music-oriented sites appear to be the single largest category on the entire Web, outnumbering sites devoted to topics such as politics, sports and even computers. (Many suspect pornography is even bigger, but that’s another story.) Net surfers’ interest, in fact, is a big factor in the explosive growth of the Web, with bands, record labels and fans adding new home pages--the calling cards of cyberspace--every day.

And that’s just for starters. People in the trenches say that in the next five to 10 years, the World Wide Web could revolutionize the music industry the way MTV did when it aired the first music video on cable television in 1981. Visionaries predict a new era in music retailing, with musicians peddling their wares directly to consumers by showcasing music and video clips and allowing buyers to download a record onto a blank CD with a few simple keystrokes and about $5.

“This is a whole new paradigm,” said Michael Dorf, who will bring rock concerts to cyberspace later this month when he produces a six-day music festival that will be broadcast live from New York City on the World Wide Web (html://www.quicktime.apple.com/NYmusic).

Because there is no central authority for the Web, there is no way to know for sure how many sites are dedicated to music. But the impression around Netscape Communications--the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm whose employees created the famed Mosaic Web browser--is that music sites are growing faster than anything else, said Chris Lamey, a Netscape engineer who majored in music in college.

Music sites were among the first to become popular, and Jerry Yang still adds more than a dozen a day to Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com), a popular “index” site that breaks down the Web by category. For many net newcomers, Yang says, music sites are the main draw in cyberspace.

The Internet Underground Music Archive (https://www.iuma.com) site records more than a quarter of a million “hits” a day, and the World Wide Web of Music (https://american.recordings.com/wwwofmusic) site--which allows visitors to update a mammoth listing of more than 1,000 bands--records another 70,000 daily hits.

Uncountable other sites have sprung up, some of them promotional pages launched by record labels or other professional marketers, others founded by fans eager to share their knowledge, opinions and gossip.

Everyone has a theory about why music and the Web are such a good mix, but the simplest reason for music’s exploding onto the Web is that it can. Music is far easier to transmit over computer lines than the moving pictures of television and movies. Compared to video, sound requires far less bandwidth--the capacity of a line to carry data--by a ratio of less than 1 to 10.

Also, Web browsers and frequent music buyers both tend to be well-educated people in their 20s, said Alan Citron, senior vice president for new media ventures at Ticketmaster, which last month debuted its own Web site (https://www.ticketmaster.com) devoted to entertainment news and concert information.

“The demographics of the Web make it just naturally oriented to music applications,” Citron said. Plus, “a lot of [musicians] are just hip kind of cutting-edge people to begin with, and this is the latest thing.”

The centerpiece of many of these sites is a discography, the definitive list of albums and songs produced by a music group. The sites usually include digitized photos and pictures of album covers. Short clips from songs are often available, sometimes with an excerpt from a music video.

But Web sites can get much more sophisticated than that. A Duran Duran site (https://web.caprec.com/Duran/) sponsored by Capitol Records hosted a lottery contest, and one for fellow Capitol artist Adam Ant (https://web.caprec.com/Ant/) featured a game that visitors could download to their computers, said Liz Heller, senior vice president for new media at the Hollywood-based record label.

For a certain segment of new albums, launching a site on the World Wide Web is as important for promoting a new record as print advertising or shooting a music video, she said.

“The Web didn’t exist in the minds of most people a year ago, and now suddenly you can’t imagine not having a Web page,” Heller said.

Music-oriented Web pages are increasingly resembling music video productions with writers, designers, directors and programmers working in tandem, said Jim Evans, who makes his living in part by designing Web pages for bands at a Santa Monica company called rVISION. But the comparison goes deeper than that.

“There will be Internet bands, just like there are MTV bands,” Evans said. “There are groups whose songs are not so great but their video is so cool that people like them. The same thing will happen with Web sites.”

For smaller labels, a World Wide Web page is the best advertising money can buy. The fact that it costs next to nothing is a bonus.

“It’s a really nice way for small record labels to get out there,” said Netscape’s Lamey, who decries the quasi-monopoly the six major music distribution companies share. “I came across the Chicago Punk label that I would never otherwise hear of, and if I like it, I can ask for their catalogue.”

About 200 sites--including those operated by the Geffen Records and Warner Bros. Music labels--are linked to CDnow (html://cdnow.com), cyberspace’s first record store. CDnow, which opened for business in August, sells T-shirts, videos and laser discs in addition to 112,000 compact disc and cassette titles.

CDnow shoppers, who number 5,000 a day, can place their orders at the Web site and charge their purchases to credit cards over the Internet using an encryption system designed by Netscape.

That brings the Web one step closer to the day when artists will market directly to consumers, cutting out distributors such as record labels.

“It’s definitely possible that down the road you may be able to look on-line at hundreds of thousands of recordings and hit a button and have the artwork print out and have a CD print right there,” said Roy Hamm, a spokesman for Geffen Records, which features 15 bands on its Web site (html://hollywoodandvine.com).

“It will definitely change the role of record labels,” Capitol’s Heller said. “Everybody has to be thinking about new models and new ways to reach consumers.”

But a lot has to happen first. For starters, the technology must be greatly improved. Even with the speediest modems, it takes hours to download a dozen songs, and so far there is no way to save them to another compact disc or digital audiotape. The rule of thumb is that it takes five minutes to download each minute of music.

In May, a Seattle company called Progressive Networks introduced RealAudio, a speedier way of sending sound over the Internet (https://www.realaudio.com). Real-Audio allows users to listen to words and music in real time, from the host computer, rather than having to go through the time-consuming process of downloading the sounds to a personal computer.

Currently, the sound bites have the quality of AM radio, according to chief executive Rob Glaser, making this version of RealAudio better suited to spoken words than music. Still, about 40% of the web sites that are equipped with Real-Audio offer a fair amount of music, he said, and higher-quality versions of the software are in the works.

If there’s anything that might stand in the way of the continued growth of music on the Web, it’s intellectual property issues. After all, the meat and potatoes of many sites--song lyrics, pictures of album covers and music clips--are protected by copyright laws.

Although fans nearly always post lyrics and clips without permission, cases of bands or labels shutting down Web sites because of copyright infringement are rare to nonexistent so far. (Personal photos and writings about a band have freedom of speech protection, even if the band does not like them.)

“We’re not going to shut anyone down for freedom of expression,” said Bethann Buddenbaum, who works for the Los Angeles firm that manages the Beastie Boys, the Breeders and Bonnie Raitt. “But we don’t want whole songs downloaded--that’s an issue of copyright protection. People are going to be able to bootleg off the Net, and while we’re not at that point yet, we might as well try to control it while we can.”

Don Passman, the lawyer who wrote “All You Need to Know About the Music Business,” said fan-sponsored Web sites are probably too small to attract much attention from copyright holders such as musicians and record labels.

“Not only are they small potatoes, it’s like stamping out little mushrooms,” he said. “You can shut down one page and 30 more will open up the next day, so it’s not very practical.”

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