I am not heavily 'into' music these days. Oh, I have had my turn playing the folk music scene in the 60's, rock bands in the 70's, and digital music (MIDI instruments and software) in the 80's. The 90's were a bit of a musical wasteland for me. I still keep a couple of guitars around the house but my un-calloused fingers beg for mercy every time I pick one up. All my keyboards, effects, drum machines, etc. are gone - sold off when I retired.
But I still listen to the radio and have the obligatory CD collection - which brings me to the topic of this column - the digital music revolution. There has been a lot of news lately about Napster and it occurred to me that many people don't know what Napster is (or, was, if the music industry gets its way) or even what digital music is. So, let's start with a bit of history.
In the pre-digital days, music was played over the airwaves and recorded on various media (cassette tape, 8-tracks, vinyl, etc.) in a type of signal called "analog". Let's not get off on the technical aspects of that, but the most important aspect of analog is that it is inherently "lossy". This means that when you play a copy of a recording, it is never as good as the original was - something is lost. Copying it compounds the loss, so that a copy made of a cassette tape sounded pretty poor - this basically kept people from copying of copyrighted music material.
Digital music is music represented as computer (digital) files - bits - ones and zeros. Again, not trying to get too technical, the distinguishing factor is that copying digital music is NOT lossy - it is lossless. So, once you have a digital music file, you can copy it forever without any loss of quality. It is also easy to send music files in e-mail or other computer communications. CD music is digital.
This alone would have been enough to engender music copying. Adding to that situation were two things: The availability of inexpensive hardware for your personal computer that allowed anyone to write (burn) their own CDs, and a music industry that kept prices high on CDs and which basically ignored the digital music copying programs until too late. Finally, the cat got out of the bag. The cat was Napster.
Napster is software written by a 19-year-old college freshman, and freely distributed. The software allowed its users to sign up and in effect make their entire digital music collection (on their individual hard drives) accessible to anyone on the Internet using the Napster software. This became vastly popular (especially among college students) and there were millions of users and a vast amount of music data exchanged every day. Some of the music was legal copies, and much of it was illegal copies. The music industry got no revenue from this, and so they finally stepped in and got a court injunction (later overturned) shutting down Napster. It will probably take years to sort this mess out.
But there is a lot of legal downloadable music on the Internet, on Napster and other sites such as www.mp3.com. Most of this is from young and upcoming artists who see it as the best way to get recognition and distribute their work. I enjoy looking for new blues artists on the Internet and have added some great stuff to my collection.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).