Thu, Aug 30, 2001 page19

• Sound hound goes on 2-week download diet

  • By Neill Straus / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  I've been spending a lot of time crawling around on my hands and knees lately.

  The reason is a self-assigned experiment: to spend two weeks listening only to music streamed or downloaded from the Internet. These were not consecutive weeks. The first took place last winter, just before a US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling ordering Napster to halt the unauthorized exchange of copyrighted songs. The second took place a few weeks ago, in a post-Napster online universe.

  I had been listening to music online for years, but only as a supplement to my CD collection and the radio. Now I wanted to make the Internet my jukebox. This was not to see if it was possible (for some, traditional CDs seem like antiques), but to see how it changed the experience of listening to music. It is an old chestnut of cultural theory that society is shaped more by the media that transmits information than by the information itself.

  As a critic whose job is based on listening to new music, I have never been exposed to more high-quality artists in a shorter amount of time. Any musicians complaining about song-sharing services like Napster, any record executives trying to work out an Internet business model, and any fans who wants a glimpse of the way music consumption and distribution will change in the future should put aside their stereos and try this experiment first.

  One thing to be learned is that the popularity of Napster and other music file-sharing services stems from one of the main problems of the current record industry: people want to consume more music than they can afford. And, online, to quote a Robert Earl Keen song I downloaded, The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.

  In the first days, I immersed myself in a maze-like world, with each song a forking corridor leading to another forking corridor. Listening to an unreleased song by the parody-rock group Tenacious D on Napster, calledTribute to the Best Song in the World, I was inspired to download songs that it reminded me of, includingDevil Went Down to Georgia by the Charlie Daniels Band and The Ride by David Allan Coe.

  Those songs, in turn, inspired me to listen to Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, which led me to search for obscure sides by the 1920s country star Vernon Dalhart and the devilish bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw -- but he did not have any songs on Napster, thus blowing the claim that every popular recording in history lay therein. In week two, however, I found a dozen Peetie Wheatstraw songs on a Napster clone, Aimster.

  Not too long ago, the wry Scottish songwriter Momus came up with his twist on Andy Warhol's aphorism, claiming everyone will be famous not for 15 minutes but to 15 people. That exaggeration was the essence of listening to music online for me: It was all about discovering new artists (many without record deals); about typing in a single word to unearth every single piece of music that contains that word; about twisting through Web pages, links and file downloads to stumble upon just the right new song.

  Because most file-sharing programs work like a standard Internet search engine, displaying all songs that contain a certain word, the nature of browsing is changing: a teenager looking for the Shaggy hit Angel may come across the Sarah McLachlan or Jimi Hendrix song of the same name, and get turned on to a different genre of music.

  As week one progressed, it became clear how the different way one apprehends music online is likely to change the nature of music making. If the long-playing record brought about a culture in which musicians aspire to the full-length album as their ultimate creative expression, then the Internet promises to return us to a world in which the song stands alone. As a result, the process of promoting music will change.

  I also discovered new music through the simplest way of listening to music online: streaming radio, which involved simply heading to a site like www.shoutcast.com or the home page of a favorite radio station and listening to the live broadcast.

  At www.billboard.com, I checked in on the hits by listening to a top-40 countdown; at www.drugmusic.com, I drifted off to sleep to a program of droning psychedelic rock; at phusion.fromdj.com, I received my hip-hop fix with DJ mix tapes; and at www.radioparadise.com, a personal favorite, I spent hours listening to the type of music that regularly makes critics' top-10 lists (from artists like Radiohead, Nick Drake, Bjork, Randy Newman and Lucinda Williams).

  More importantly, listening to these music streams was a way to nationalize local radio and catch up with some favorite college stations, like WFMU-FM in East Orange, New Jersey, for independent, hard-to-find new music; WNUR-FM in Evanston, Illinois, a station I grew up with; and CKUT-FM in Montreal, one of the best places to hear experimental radio plays and sound art. And, in a nice change from most home radio reception, all these small-wattage stations were received with a clear signal.
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