by Ravini Thenabadu

The next time you walk into a record store, you may want to pause for a moment and drink in the experience. Get a good look at the pimple-faced 16-year-old leaning smugly on the cash register; take a big whiff of all those brand new, wooden tape racks and run your hand slowly over the rows of new CDs, neatly stacked like a card catalogue. Enjoy music stores while you can, for they could end up as one of those obscure things you try to explain to your grandchildren in times to come.

Actually that’s a bit of an exaggeration. There’s no reason to get misty-eyed just yet. But in a few years, your computer may make trips to music stores obsolete. With the onset of online music shops, radio stations and record labels, as well as MP3s ("CD quality" downloadable music files), the music industry is feeling the effects of an Internet tremor that’s about to become an earthquake, changing the way you acquire music.

When Clash front man Joe Strummer said that rock-and-roll turns rebellion into money, he had the music’s message-not its medium-in mind. At the time, vinyl, 8-tracks, and cassettes were the norm, and the revolutionary "compact disc" was only on the horizon. Strummer was simply describing the conscientious pop musician’s familiar Catch-22: The reward for establishing yourself as counterculture is mainstream acceptance, and the return for successful subversion is often a million-selling record.

Many an outlaw rocker learns the hard way that his anti-Establishment stance is often just what the Establishment is looking to sell. Just ask Kurt Cobain. If this insurgent’s paradox seems familiar in the microcosms of both music and digital technology, it might follow that it rings particularly true when those two worlds collide. Which brings us to MP3-perhaps the most conspicuous and controversial intersection of music and technology of the last few decades.

When MP3 broke onto the scene in the late 1990s, it was as defied by the kids, and as demonised by the powers that be, as rock-and-roll in the 1950s. MP3-related traffic, both legal and illegal, swamped university servers, as college students ripped, uploaded, downloaded, and swapped MP3 files faster than anyone could track.

From the musician’s perspective, MP3 also seemed to share rock’s do-it-yourself ethos. Rock-and-roll-particularly at its birth and later with punk rock-showed that you could make music with just three chords and a guitar. MP3 seemed to promise that you could distribute it with just a few keystrokes and a website.

What lead the world in digital downloads was a young company, Napster Inc., started last year by 19-year-old student Shawn Fanning that threw the music industry into a kind of panic. Fanning’s software allowed people to link their computers directly to each other to share their music collections without paying companies or artists for the songs.

At any time, thousands of people are online, sharing hundreds of thousands of songs through Napster’s directory, working like a co-op where users sign on and trade their libraries of MP3 files. The software, available free, enabled users to search a giant database that grows every time a new user signs on.

This legacy that boomed for slightly more than a year ended at midnight, July 28th, 2000 when they lost the legal battle to RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). In their defense, they said "the truth is, the making and distributing of unauthorized copies of copyrighted works by Napster users is not ‘sharing,’ any more than stealing apples from your neighbour’s tree is ‘gardening.’" What began as a serious headache for the music industry is rapidly becoming a nightmare for anyone who publishes content in the form of computer files.

At the rate things are going, copyright laws may become completely unenforceable online because of the spread of the variants of Napster. These newer programs reach beyond music to allow the easy sharing of virtually any file across the Internet. And, unlike Napster’s developers, creators of the newer software often make no bones about its purpose - to facilitate the illegal online sharing of files.

The demise of the major record labels has yet to happen, despite the predictions of many new media pundits. If anything, the activity from the music industry over the past year demonstrates that the sleeping giant may be starting to "get it." MTV’s purchase of SonicNet, Time Warner and Sony buying CDNow and Universal’s embracing of digital downloads, at least partially, all demonstrate that the industry is taking the net seriously.

Still, even some of the savviest record executives believe that 80 percent of world’s music will be sold over the retail counter for the next 10 years. At the same time, major artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T have been willing to forgo platinum sales numbers to throw their hats into the digital ring. Promotional downloads from Tom Petty, Sarah McLaughlan, The Beastie Boys and others helped boost sales in 1999.

Having said that, you know you’ve got a phenomenon on your hands when a simple audio technology becomes more popular than sex, more scandalous than drugs, and bigger than rock-and-roll.