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       Chapter 3 A CULTURE OF MUTATION: THE RISING INFRASTRUCTURE

      Music is a thread tightly woven within the fabric of its time. While social forces play a huge and celebrated role in its history, an equally rich story lurks beneath the developments of the electric guitar, the microphone, the distortion pedal, and the recording studio—each has played an impressive role in shaping the sounds of our culture. Music is rooted in the interaction of humans, their artifacts, and the world in which they all meet. Whether through musical scores, trumpets, electric guitars, or drum machines, technology is always present—even fundamental. By the time the recording and playback processes play their parts, and the particular medium in which a work is heard lends its context, the end result is sound that has been soaked in technology its entire length.

      A shift towards synthesizers, sampling, and digital production studios means that in many cases songs nowadays are created that exist from beginning to end as purely digital code. The switch to online digital distribution fits in perfectly with these developments, just as occupations as diverse as journalist, stocktrader, and office manager have found themselves less concerned with physical objects and more concerned with playing roles within a larger datascape of networked computers. Almost all recent commercially released music has been digitally recorded, or at the very least, mastered. To go to the trouble of actually pressing a song’s data onto a CD, when there are faster, more efficient ways of distributing the ones and zeroes, is increasingly anachronistic.

      Even the software that plays online music, today’s digitally built versions of yesterday’s hi-fi, benefits from the change to networked distribution. A fundamental advantage of software over hardware when it comes to music tools like MP3 players is that even if you want to make a big update, you don’t have to remold, recast, or physically reconstruct your product. Buggy software is often released in not-ready-for-primetime incarnations, while developers work to upgrade it, in hopes that users will suggest repairs or, in the case of open-source software users, actually make needed repairs themselves. If a team of programmers builds a music player that doesn’t have a volume control, they don’t have to scrap the program and write a new one, but simply add on as they go. Totally at odds with old-fashioned notions of materials and scarcity, once one copy is made, all others can be copied for next to nothing, and improvements spread easily, anywhere in the world.

      This freedom is what drives the amazing speed and ferocious adoption rate of the software distributed on Internet. As the entertainment industry becomes increasingly high-tech, through distribution as well as production, all indications are that the pace of innovation and mutation will accelerate, at least until monopolies develop. As high-speed Net connections and powerful computers became the norm, what was true for software became true for mass media. The costs of distributing one copy of a song on the Net and 50 million of them are practically the same. The industry was slow to get its mind around this radical notion, so at odds with the fundamental economic concept of scarcity. The history of online music companies has made one thing clear: those that took advantage of the Net’s most radical effects had the greatest impact. A slow and steady path that merely updated old-style marketing of scarce, expensive products meant very slow rates of consumer adoption and disappointing growth for the field. Those companies that ignored the rules—and maybe even the rule of law—succeeded in creating a mass movement.

      If the Internet before 1995 was not exactly silent, beyond the novelty, most listening was not much fun. If you were lucky enough to have a high-speed connection at work or school, you could download songs with only a short wait. But outside that lucky circle, at a time when 14.4 kbs modems were considered hot stuff, getting music over the Net was like waiting for ketchup to flow from a new bottle: pretty frustrating if you were hungry.

      By the time the Internet appeared on the covers of magazines and newspapers and had worked its way into the American consciousness, it was clear to the cognoscenti that audio on the Net would eventually be a mass phenomenon. But it seemed to most that the bandwidth commonly available to consumers could not support a mass audience for a decade. It seemed that Internet audio would only arrive after the full range of interactive TV and wired home entertainment had time to blossom.

      One man wasn’t willing to wait around for speedier Net connections before he shook things up. When Rob Glaser unveiled RealAudio in 1995—over two years before MP3.com was launched—something clicked. Sure, the buzzing, noisy sound of highly compressed audio was not great. But the gratification that came from listening to what you wanted without waiting an hour or two for a download, even when using a puny home modem, won streaming media a place in the hearts—and on the desktops—of many. A huge network of audio providers, including radio stations, retailers, and Web sites looking to expand their offerings, like CNET and HotWired, effectively made “Real” the Internet standard for streaming audio (and the main contender for video soon after).

      Rob Glaser, the burly, sometimes confrontational former Microsoft VP, knew perfectly well how to play the standards game. He was determined to make the most of his new company, his first since resigning from Microsoft following a rumored power struggle with Nathan Myhrvold to head the company’s multimedia division. For Glaser, the moment he first used the Mosaic browser, he knew he’d found something that would change everything.

      “To me media is the center and the formalization of everything there is about human society,” Glaser

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