FROM THE INTERNET ... It's music to your ears

A new generation of wireless technology is debuting this fall.
By GLENN GAMBOA
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
THE WORLD WILL SOON BE a music lover's paradise -- one where perfect pop songs hang enticingly in the air like the aroma of Mom's home cooking, one where slow-dance songs from generations of high school proms surprise you like old friends. Any song you could ever want will be yours for less than a buck, zooming into your life in a matter of seconds.
Music will accompany you wherever you go, stored temporarily in your cell phone or wristwatch or compressed meticulously into one of those snazzy digital music players that will soon be able to hold the entire contents of your CD collection on a device small enough to fit on your keychain.
Raging battle
The battle over these developments has raged for years, as entertainment conglomerates struggled to keep control of its money-making music, while many fans schemed to release it in a free-of-charge, all-you-can-eat buffet. Only in recent months, after the bona fide success of Apple's iTunes Music Store, have the two sides managed to reach a settlement that paves the way for a grand new future.
"We are now on the edge of an entertainment revolution," says Scott Blum, founder and chief executive of BuyMusic.com, the world's largest online music download site. "It's all driven by technology, like the Internet 2.0. First, it established new ways of communication -- e-mail and Web sites. The next wave will be about entertainment and its distribution. By year-end, it will be here."
Blum's BuyMusic.com -- like a growing number of dot-coms that include Apple, AOL and Listen.com and will soon include Microsoft, Amazon and Roxio's revamped Napster -- is counting on making the most of that revolution. Blum says a new generation of wireless gadgets, set to debut this fall, will foster this change, since they will allow music lovers to download songs from anywhere with a wireless connection, not just at a desktop computer linked to the Internet.
It's the next step in the technology that allows us to make calls and trade pictures on our cell phones. Instead of using a cell phone to send a vacation picture to friends, the new devices will connect to online music stores, which currently house about 350,000 songs and allow users to download whatever they want.
In many ways, the revolution is already here.
"The iTunes Music Store is changing the way people buy music," Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, says in a prepared statement. It "has far surpassed our expectations and clearly illustrates that many customers are hungry for a legal way to acquire their music online."
Limited to Mac users
The online store has bridged the gap between consumers and the music industry, though its initial rollout is a decidedly limited release to Macintosh computer users. That, too, will change in the fall when the store begins selling music to those with Windows-based computers and iPods.
Though most marvel at the technology behind iTunes and Apple's iPod, which can hold nearly 7,500 songs in a device the size of a cassette tape, the bigger development was getting the record companies to loosen their grip on their catalogs and new releases enough to sell songs at 99 cents apiece and allow customers to use the songs as they saw fit.
Until the deal with Apple, music companies restricted the use of songs they sold online -- limiting the number of times a song could be transferred to a CD or having it become unusable after a certain period.
Most fans, who were used to getting music for free through file-swapping sites, found the restrictions so ridiculous that they continued to weather all the inconveniences of downloading and all the threats of prosecution instead of patronizing the legitimate sites.
"The iTunes Music Store has defined what it means for people to have music instantly -- and legally -- at their fingertips," says Doug Morris, Universal Music Group's chief executive. "The iTunes Music Store is pushing us into the future of how music is produced and consumed."
That shift has begun. Pop-punker Avril Lavigne recently released live versions of her songs and a cover of Green Day's "Basket Case" online through the iTunes Music Store. Those tracks will be available only online until October, when her live album and DVD "My World" come to stores.
Debate over practice
The online-only release, the first-ever by a major act, flies in the face of the argument most in the music industry have used for years: that downloading music hurts sales. Anecdotally, though, music fans counter that sampling albums through downloading generally encourages them to buy the full CD in the stores. Downloading, they say, protects them from buying high-priced CDs that have only one or two good songs surrounded by filler that boosts the price of the CD but not its quality.
Despite the online release of the tracks, most expect Lavigne's live album to sell well, even after the online release of some of its key tracks.
Singer-songwriter Ben Folds offers another example of how music has shifted because of downloading, which allows him to release new material online whenever he wants. "I have 24-hour access to a studio now, so I'm using it," Folds explains. "Quietly releasing my music as EPs allows me to get it out there as I finish it with a minimum of hype. It's for people who buy my music anyway. It won't be sold in the big ... chains, because that puts the price up and starts the big ... machinery -- press, radio etc."
One step further
Others are taking the freedom of online distribution one step further. John Lydon, better known as Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten, is one of a growing number of artists looking to eliminate all the middle men in the music industry by using the Internet to connect directly to fans.
The music industry and the download sites are rushing to get in place to keep up with the rapid growth of high-speed Internet access.
According to the Pew Internet & amp; American Life Project, about 35 million Americans have a broadband connection, up about 50 percent over last year.
Getting standards in place became even more important after another Pew survey showed that 67 percent of Internet users who download music didn't care whether the songs are copyrighted, even as the RIAA pushed lawsuits against those who made copyrighted songs available to others.
Though record companies say illegal downloading and bootlegging are to blame, industry experts counter that larger issues are at work. "It's really only about half the problem," says Russ Crupnick, vice president of industry analysts The NPD Group. "There's a demographic problem -- with those older than 35 saying that there's less music out there that interests them, with the exception of country. Among the labels, there is now this recognition that they can't drive this business with just Britney Spears. They have to go older."