Custom CDs From Cyberspace a Reality, but Not a Bargain

How many times have you heard a song you liked on the radio, rushed to the music store to buy the CD and returned home only to discover that the rest of the CD was . . . well, less than you expected?

Now imagine a new cyber world where you can preview individual songs on the Internet and buy only the songs you like. You type in your credit card information and, wham, the songs are zapped onto your hard drive, where you can play them using free software. Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?

A few companies have already pioneered the technology and are offering this service. Don’t confuse this budding innovation with other Internet audio technologies such as RealAudio (https://www.realaudio.com) and Thomas Dolby’s Rich Music Format (https://www.headspace.com), which are geared to one-time, online listening use. I’m talking about music you can download now and hear tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that.

Granted, you’re not likely to find many big-name artists who offer music in this kind of format--not yet, anyway. The day I visited Global Music (https://www.globalmusic.com), a company that sells songs in a format called Electric Records (https://www.electricrecords.com), for example, the featured album was the debut of a folk rock group called the Puddle Jumpers.

A company called Liquid Audio (https://www.liquidaudio.com) has developed a format to compete with Electric Records. At its site, I noticed a couple of familiar names, MC Hammer and George Benson, but no real chart-toppers there either. I guess the current value of these technologies depends on your musical tastes.

When I heard about all this, I was skeptical. For starters, I wondered how the cost of buying individual songs compares with the cost of buying 10 or so songs on a single CD. The price seems a little high.

At Global Music, for example, you pay $9.90 for a “bankroll” that allows you to buy 10 songs. That’s 99 cents per song, hardly a great deal.

I also wondered about file size. I’ve fiddled around with copying songs from a music CD to my hard drive, and the files were huge. An entire album could easily eat up your whole hard drive.

On this issue I was pleasantly surprised. A three-minute CD-quality song delivered in Electric Records’ proprietary format uses less than 1.5 megabytes of memory. That still ties up your modem for a few minutes, but at least the file is a tolerable size.

Then I asked myself who in the heck wants to sit in front of a PC listening to music. I found the answer while trying out the Liquid Audio player--free software for Windows and PowerMac that you can download from the company’s Web site. (You also can download the Electric Records player from its Web site, but the software is currently available only for Windows.)

The Liquid Audio player is a cool little program. With it, you can view the song lyrics, liner notes, album art and credits while listening to the music. But the best part comes when you click on a Tracks button on your screen, which displays another button labeled Make CD.

If your computer has a compact disc-recordable drive, you can click on this button and record the music directly onto a CD-R. Doing this enables you to transport your downloaded music to your stereo.

What are the drawbacks? I already mentioned the lack of big-name artists. Also, if you don’t have a CD-R drive (they’re currently about $400), you’re going to be stuck in front of your computer listening to your favorite tunes. If that’s the case, you may want to upgrade your computer speakers.

There’s another problem. Because Liquid Audio, Electric Records and other competing companies offer incompatible technologies, you may not be able to find the music you want in the audio format and from the online store you prefer.

Is downloading music one song at a time on your own CDs better than picking up the finished product at a music store? It depends on how much you want to have a CD with only the music you like.

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If you plan to make your own CDs, you have to figure the price of the blank CD-Rs (about $4 each) into the cost. By the time you buy these and pay about $1 per downloaded song, you’re at the price of a store-bought CD--which, by the way, you didn’t have to spend time creating yourself.

This kind of pricing reflects the music industry’s ambivalence about digital distribution. Buying music this way is in many respects far more efficient than purchasing music at a retail store, but music executives are paranoid about the piracy opportunities it could create. And in the long run it could render record firms as we know them obsolete by enabling artists to distribute directly to their fans.

I’m looking forward to a day when some variation of a personal computer replaces my stereo system. Then I’ll have some real flexibility. In the meantime, I’m about to fire up KC and the Sunshine Band on my eight-track.

Kim Komando is a TV host, syndicated talk radio host, author and entrepreneur. You can visit Kim on the Internet at https://www.komando.com or e-mail her at komando@komando.com.