Don’t count on the Ugly Mugs pushing Billy Joel off the charts, or even showing up at your closest record store.

They’re zany, avant-garde musicians whose work is a cross between Frank Zappa and freakish, carnival rock—not the stuff of the Top 40. But Jeff Patterson, a thin, pale guitarist with a fondness for old jeans and green-topped sneakers, can still spread the word about himself and the other Mugs. Their music is on the Internet. Fans as far off as Turkey and Japan can dial the Internet Underground Music Archive run by Patterson and his “co-czar,” Rob Lord. Hundreds of musicians are suddenly in cyberspace. For just $100 a year they can pay IUMA to post cuts from their music, complete with information on how you can send away for the CDs and tapes. In fact, some have even posted complete songs to the Net for free.

Tens of thousands of Netfolk a week dial up IUMA, making 200,000 page-accesses—perhaps a third of the attention that Playboy gets, but still one of the best numbers on the Web. That’s no small feat: The archive more or less started in a tiny room with a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and it is still a low-budget operation run by two information science majors.

IUMA is just one of many delights on the Net for techies and technophobes alike. Entertainment and culture are taking off in a major way in cyberspace just when clueless Snubbites are deriding the Net as artless. I can enjoy gifted but unheralded performers, from reggae artists to banjo players. The New Zealand Symphony is online with a digitized rendition of the national anthem down there. Imagine the possibilities for fans of classical music in the future—the chances to hear live performances of Tchaikovsky directly from Moscow, or enjoy classical Chinese music from Peking or Taipei. Net.radio is already here. WYXC, for example, a station at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sends rock music into the ether twenty-four hours a day.

Running software called RealAudio, owners of deluxe home computers can hear top-ten rap from an Internet site in South Korea, astrological forecasts from England, and selected programs from ABC News, National Public Radio, the C-SPAN cable network, the radio version of the Christian Science Monitor, the National Press Club, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and a wealth of other draws whenever they want—even weeks or months after the original broadcasts.

Just a mouse click on the right Web address conjures up a Daniel Schorr commentary, or a feature about the Illinois reporter whom the mob supposedly buried in concrete, or scads of other NPR offerings that I wish I could have enjoyed when they first aired. I don’t have to bother with tricky downloads of files containing the sound. This happens on its own.

RealAudio sounds rather muffled right now, at least on my computer, as if the technology is a throwback to 1920s radio. But sooner or later it will make FM stereo seem antediluvian.

Consider, too, the diversity of programming from grassroots people who can broadcast at a fraction of the costs of even peanut-whistle stations. Thousands of mom-and-pop sites—unencumbered by the Federal Communications Commission, unless the nanny faction wins out in D.C. and cracks down on the Net—may be online in the next year or two. What happens when unpopular political beliefs spread around this way? Will the Oklahoma City tragedy be invoked to squelch RealAudio and equivalents?

Cheerier possibilities may arise. Someday you might go hiking in the middle of the Rockies and be able to tune in performances and talk shows from all over the world through a net.satellite link; never mind the limits of the local radio stations.

Even video transmission will be routine over the Net or a successor. And then what? When Michael Moriarty, a TV actor, appeared in a public Q & A session on Prodigy, the possibilities made him wonder if network television would go the way of vinyl records. “Television,” he told the New York Times, “might become the 33-1/3 of the visual arts.”

For the moment, however, the Net is Fan Central for television along with other media. David Letterman fans and those of Jay Leno debate the merits of their favorite talk show hosts, while major movie studios preview their megahits with video clips. Elvis is alive and well in an area on the Web. And just when we Netfolks are ridiculing the TV moguls’ dream of 500 channels of Terminator movies, Hollywood has used our Net to ballyhoo Junior—a comedy starring the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As if that isn’t enough, Hollywood has just released The Net, a thriller with some evil techies; let’s see what the marketers will post on the Web to push that one. Lower on the show business hierarchy, you can find model Danielle Ash replying to questions, in alt.sex.breasts, about her double Fs.

Netfolks with more elevated tastes can dial up the WebMuseum, Paris, or check out the works of new digital artists from Boston or New York or dozens of other big cities. Obviously the Net isn’t the same as beholding a Rembrandt in Holland and gazing into the face of a local man or woman a few feet away. That’s screamingly clear. Stoll, the near Snubbite, correctly notes that “Rembrandt painted real people—their facial features and mannerisms live on today in the Dutch population. Dressed in period costumes, I’ll bet the security guard with his war medals and the young woman tour guide would look as if they stepped out of one of those incredibly detailed paintings.” Moving and true. Imagine, however, the benefits of the WebMuseum to people without the Snubbites’ ability to jet to Amsterdam or Paris. What’s more, the Web brings its own glories to compensate; I can view Artist X’s work, then call up text about the person or the times; if anything the Web can provide more context than do the skimpy handouts available at most museums.

Caviling away, Stoll also objects that computers can’t reproduce the art exactly. But colors and resolution will just keep improving. The Snubbites who rant about lost details remind me of the foes of electronic books; incorrectly, given the ease of digitizing everything, the foes worry that new technology could kill off distinctive type-faces. But we shouldn’t preserve art and literature just by attending to the detail work. Culture also needs a place in the public mind; da Vinci-class art should be free, or close to it, by way of the Net. That is surely the ethos of Nicholas Pioch. An ex-Microsoft intern now studying economics in his native France, he is behind the WebMuseum, Paris, the new name it bears, now that bureaucrats won’t let him say, “Le WebLouvre.”

Within Le WebLouvreWebLouvre—there, I’ll say it anyway—I saw such da Vincis as Mona Lisa and Virgin and Child with the Infant John the Baptist and St. Anne. I went on to look at Rembrandts, van Goghs, Cezannes, Dalis, Klees, and Manets, among others, and to read two warnings. “If you think the law prevents you from viewing these exhibits, you should stop now and do something more interesting, such as flying to Paris and touring live!” Pioch wrote. “Some companies may be trying to get a monopolistic grab on arts and culture,” he said elsewhere, “developing a pay-per-view logic, shipping out CD-ROMs while trying to patent stuff which belongs to each of us: a part of our human civilization and history.”

How right Pioch was. Bill Gates has just bought a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci, and let’s hope that like some of the old robber barons, Gates will habitually share his acquisitions with the world. But a major difference shows up here. Andrew Carnegie and the rest did not make their money off art and entertainment, part of Gates’ master plan. For Bill Gates to give away great paintings and manuscripts will be like Carnegie giving away steel. His motives may be the most ethereal, and with a $10-billion net worth, he can afford many a donation; but a conflict will forever arise between Gates the businessman and Gates the philanthropist. Just which side will prevail when he dies? If not in life, then in death, by way of his lawyers, will he have the decency to turn all his old masters loose on the Net for free viewing? No judgments here. Perhaps that day will come. He has already agreed to loan the notebook to a museum.

Old masters, of course, are far from the only Culture on the Net, and I doubt that Bill Gates will be interested in buying some of the other kind—especially Bianca’s Smut Shack. Don’t ask me if Bianca exists. The Shack’s “trolls” swear that she does. If so, maybe a good many Netfolks know her at least slightly. They can click on a picture to flit from room to room of her virtual apartment on the Web, leave notes on the walls of her virtual bathroom, enter her virtual music room to take in the latest jazz or rock, or engage virtually in sex acts with strangers in Argentina or Brazil or San Francisco or wherever else hormones fuel technology.

Bianca’s proud trolls have not sold out their mascot; the virtual Bianca lives on the Web for fun, not direct money making. But sooner or later, elsewhere on the Net, if this has not happened already, an ad agency will create a fictitious character who buys CDs, foods, books, video tapes, automobiles, and other products only from hidden “sponsors”—not open, MCI-style ones (as described in chapter 2). I’ll hope that day is far off. The FCC has had problems enough regulating children’s TV; imagine what could happen if supposedly educational areas knuckled under to Madison Avenue. I’m not sure if laws are the solution here, but it would behoove Net providers to come up now with rules against that sort of thing.

In the fun areas of the Net, other dangers lurk for the vulnerable. Millions of Netfolks enjoy role-playing in imaginary worlds known as Multi-User Dungeons, where they can be knights or damsels, regardless of gender—sometimes men assume women’s roles to win more attention. At the risk of sounding like Stoll and the Snubbites, I have mixed feelings about the worth of MUD-style diversions.

A real potential exists for cocaine-heavy addiction—far more than just regular Netsurfing, where you’re not competing to rescue a fair maiden or dodge alien attacks. Stories circulate of role-players who have kissed off good grades and careers. Up in Canada, one player got so wrapped up in his game that my researcher found him amid wall-to-wall trash as he struggled to balance his schoolwork and role-playing.

Just like online groups for depressed people, however, MUDs and similar areas can bring shy Netfolks together face to face. I heard of several romances, in fact, that the games led to. Risks notwithstanding, games do more good than harm if players just know when to quit. Like it or not, among millions of Netfolks, MUDs and cousins are as much a part of the Internet as the Web and @ signs.

Of all the entertainment on the Net, however, the musical and video kinds could most intrigue the masses as the technology takes off; with just a modem, a reasonably powerful computer, and a $100 sound card, you can hear the offerings of IUMA and similar areas. You don’t even need programs such as Mosaic or Netscape if you know what you’re doing. People with cheapie dial-up connections and no frills software can download rock albums and the rest. Granted, the technology as a whole could be better, and even using IUMA can tax the wallets and patience of some. In most cases you’ll spend more time downloading the music—from a remote machine to your own—than you will hearing it. Fidelity on some setups may be just this side of a tin can. But that’s now. Wait.

Transmissions in the future will zip along through cable TV connections to the Internet, or through ISDN^[3.1] phone connections. Then you’ll truly be able to use the Net as a jukebox and hear what you click on with your mouse. What’s more, even now, with the right software, you can enjoy almost CD-ROM-quality fidelity from areas such as IUMA. Audio was the next step up after text, of course, and, yes, video is on the way. Techies already have mounted gigabyte after gigabyte of amateur videos on the Net. Sooner or later, directors of little films will enjoy a monster-sized IUMA-style archive. Perhaps Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, those co-czars of IUMA, will run it, too.

If you think that the $10-billion-a-year recording industry is a little nervous, you’re right. In early 1994 Lord told the San Jose Mercury News: “We want to kill the record companies.” He and Patterson have backed off since then; they’ve even helped Warner and other giants set up Net areas of their own. IUMA’s own 500-act selection is pathetic compared to those at the largest record stores. Still, think about the long run: The IUMA model just might jeopardize the seven-digit salaries of top recording executives. After all, if the Net can advertise music and even be used to take orders—perhaps with electronic forms—just what becomes of the big studios? They themselves will sell music directly over the Net, but with heavy competition.

The bypass-the-middle-man idea could apply in other ways. What about radio hosts, for example? Suppose they can reach people all over the world through the Internet, and perhaps ultimately through wireless connections based on the Net. Will they need CBS or NBC or ABC or equivalents as much as they do now? I can already download snippets from, say, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Too, just what will be the fate of art dealers if so much of art goes digital and people can discover artists on their own without leaving their living rooms? Publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books, of course, are in a quandary—see the next chapter on electronic publishing.

In some ways I don’t envy the big guys. IUMA is clearly wired into the Internet, while companies such as CBS, at least at this point, are fumbling in some respects. Many of the amateurs on the Net are actually coming up with better offerings than are the professionals. When I dropped by, the official Letterman page on the WWW was far from an abomination, and yet at the same time it showed the problems here.

The page indeed was full of odds and ends about how to get Late Show tickets, Letterman’s upcoming guests, his top-ten lists (the one for the April 13th broadcast was on “Ways CBS Can Raise Money,” with number one being “A two-hour paycheck freeze on Letterman”), and the rest. But where were the connections with the rest of the Net, especially the many Letterman fans out there? How about the fans’ Letterman pages? Or relevant mailing lists or newsgroups? Perhaps they were there but hidden, but whatever the case the cyberspace Letterman was less hip than the one on The Box.

To Letterman’s credit, he didn’t fake things. He publicly confessed he was ignorant of data ways. But in my opinion, his Web people could have done better.

Moving on to the CBS home page, I saw an offer for me to “Join the EYE ON THE NET club. That way we can send you more information about CBS and its programs. You can also take part in special previews and other interactive events. Fill out the following registration form and we’ll give you a special CBS screen saver just for joining.” Oh, boy, that was just why I was on the Internet—to end up on marketers’ lists. I didn’t blame CBS for trying; some of Letterman’s fans would like the free software. But surely the network could have done better.

Aaron Barnhart, who put out a good little electronic fan newsletter called Late Show News, defended Dave’s people on the Net. “I think it’s great,” he said of the official Letterman area. “All of these large entities are trying their best to integrate with the interactive age. A lot of e-mail gets passed that you never see, so don’t assume that just because there aren’t any bulletin boards ... there is no interaction happening.”

Perhaps he was being kind to his sources for his newsletter—I hadn’t any idea. What was clear was that he’d made a second career of Lettermandom. He devoted twenty to thirty hours a week to Letterman-related activities. Much of his newsletter was a review of reviews (“Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote one of his standard pitiless columns last week on the Oscars broadcast, and we quote, ‘in which the belly-flopping David Letterman demonstrated just how large a bullet he dodged by not moving his own show to L.A.’”). Barnhart also served as owner of the Top 10 List (“60,000 subscribers and booming”).

So what was Barnhart in it for? He was freelancing for the Village Voice, and I could see where some attention might do any writer’s career good, but if Barnhart even wanted to be on The Late Show itself, he did a pretty good job of concealing that. “Attention is great,” he said, “but it doesn’t pay the rent.” Did he send stuff into the show? “No.” So why was Letterman so popular on the Net? “Demographics.” Well-off computer owners just liked that kind of program.

I checked out the Letterman page maintained by Jason A. Lindquist, an electronic engineering student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, a self-described “Statistician, Smart-Ass-for-Hire, and Mac Programmer.” I found references to newsgroup postings on such items as “Dave instigates the feud with Bryant Gumbel with these words,” “The great Stevie Nicks controversy of 1986,” “Madonna—Your first choice to date your son,” and “No inside stuff on the strong guy or the fat guy here.” And I saw mentions of the newsletter, the Frequently Asked Questions List, and at least two Letterman-related newsgroups. CBS ought to hire this guy.

It was time to move on to alt.fans.letterman. I did a search within Netscape for the word “Leno” in the subject header and found a post from an apparent Leno fan on the attack: “Everyone knows that Jay Leno is way better than ugly gap-tooth Dave!”

“Oh,” replied one of the faithful, “you say that Jay Leno is still on the air? Is it true that they use a wide-angle lens to photograph that lantern jaw of his? Just wondering.”

“Letterman has more comedy in his little pinkie toe than Leno will have in his wildest dreams,” said another Davite, “and if Letterman is so ugly, who has all the models and top actresses flirting with him and asking him to go out—it certainly isn’t Leno.”

That, not the official Letterman area, was the true Net. Just what might await the world if the inmates actually ran the asylum and themselves mounted a major entertainment effort rather than trusting the corporate world. It had happened with the Internet Underground Music Archives, and I liked the results.

The normal story is that IUMA began when Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, the co-czars, met in a newsgroup devoted to supermodels. Both liked Kate Moss, a waify Calvin Klein woman; strutting down the runways, she was lost amid the big, bosomy knockouts favored by so many young men on the Net. It turned out that Lord and Patterson were both from Valencia, California, a far-north suburb of Los Angeles. They knew each other slightly from William Hart High School, both had worked in record stores while teenagers, and both had both been attending the University of California at Santa Cruz. That’s the story, and it’s true.

IUMA, however, in another way, may have started not on the Net but in the corporeal United Kingdom.

Thousand and thousands of Brits were dancing to synthesized bleeps, conks, cooonkks, clunks, bomb-bombs and tssss-tsss-tssses, and odds and ends that I could never even come close to reproducing here. The name of the music was Rave, as in “raving mad,” and by the time Lord was in high school in the 1980s, the craze had found its way to Los Angeles.

Middle-class white suburbanites, Latinos, Blacks, they were all bleeping and conking together, thousands of them, risking the wrath of the fire department, overcrowding the halls, going at it from 11 P.M. on, some dancing twelve hours on into the morning.

“No place in Los Angeles,” Lord said of the Rave halls, “had such a peaceful coexistence as between these three groups. They didn’t say anything. They shared the beats and feelings and the technology. And on the Rave scene, the person in charge is the DJ, and they’re sort of the cultural funnel. The DJs were in charge of finding these odd records that would come from Belgium and from the UK and from Chicago, and there were some made-in-Los Angeles things. They were hard to find, but the DJs were responsible for scouting them out and bringing the very latest bleeps and conks together.”

“So,” I asked, thinking of IUMA and Lord’s chance to bring the world to his listeners, “you liken yourself to those DJs?”

“Yeah, yeah!” Lord said enthusiastically. “I believe IUMA is my personal implementation of Rave’s calling. I just love working with technology and all those kinds of things, and what Rave culture espoused was that there’s a new revolution going on, an information revolution. You know, one of the biggest stars of Rave music was a band called Dee-Lite. And one of the first lines was, ‘From New York City in the age of communication.’ And that means all kinds of communications, a shrinking world, Internet, it means ideas and the convergence of ideas.”

Returning to the subject of his younger days, Rob Lord told me how much he hated the Depeche Mode music that was so popular in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like his—the kind the record stores were selling. He wanted his music from the clubs, from the 100-copy pressing, not from the megaconglomerates offering the likes of Depeche. “The lyrics were terrible, and the emotions were feigned.” I’m sure Depeche fans might disagree. The point, however, was that Depeche music was much more readily available at record stores than Rave was, and Rob grew unhappy with the distribution system.

Jeff Patterson, working at a music store, just like Rob Lord, was equally disgusted. Patterson and co-workers “would sit there and talk about who’s making all the money.” CDs cost $15-$17 at Music Plus, his employer. Elsewhere they were around $12-$13. “And you know, we were thinking like, ‘Where is that extra $4 being pocketed?’ You know, after all the costs were taken out, then their manager would get paid, the record company would get paid, people on the tour would get paid, and then the band would finally get some money after all that, and it was usually a very small check. So the artists that were actually continuing to be artists were the artists that were making money; so it was, like, this level of superstardom that was consistent and the barriers of entry were extremely high.”

That was true in all kinds of creative endeavors, especially in writing. I myself was amused when lobbyists representing industries such as music and publishing would rant on and on about the need for “creative incentives.” If business people at the megaconglomerates really understood incentives, they would cut out their caviar, sell off the executive jets, and spend more than a modicum on garden-variety artists—not just the Mailers and Madonnas. When, even as a teenager, Jeff Patterson started asking where the money was going, he was laying some of the more important underpinnings for IUMA.

An “A” student who would later graduate near the top of his class, Patterson wrote a school paper on another major issue: censorship. Back in the 1980s, Tipper Gore, Al’s wife, had helped start a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, which wanted to rate music and keep the more nefarious offerings out of the hands and CD players of young people. “I was a big fan of Frank Zappa and he was basically taking it upon himself to challenge the PMRC.” The Senate held hearings. And Patterson recalled that PMRC deemed a Zappa recording, “Jazz from Hell,” to be sinful. The album lacked lyrics and the cover just showed Zappa’s face. “It was obvious,” Patterson said of Tipper’s group, “that they weren’t actually listening to the content or caring what it was. They just kind of labeled some artists as being bad, and therefore were trying to prevent stores from selling many albums.” I asked if that made Patterson think later on, “Let’s go on the Net so we don’t have those bozos to worry about.” “Yeah, yeah. That actually had a big part in it.”

From the start, it was clear that Patterson’s own music wouldn’t exactly please the conventional. In high school he played guitar in speed metal bands, which are “usually a lot faster, a lot more angry sounding” than heavy metal. When the Ugly Mugs found each other at William Hart High, Patterson rejoiced in his friends’ weirdness. The style in this case was Dada, a form of random art.

“Who cared if anyone liked listening to it,” Patterson said. “We just wanted to play it. We were using mainly guitar and keyboards and bass. However, we wouldn’t always play them in the normal standard ways. Like, we’d use guitar for percussion or something, and we had also used a vacuum cleaner and things like that. A lot of times we just recorded sounds of things that were just laying around.” Their big gig was at an interpretative dancing class at a community college where teacher and students loved Dada-style mime.

The Ugly Mugs was a life, not just a band. Except for an Egyptian guitarist, whose hair stubbornly kept turning into an Afro when he let it grow, all the Mugs sported long locks. In a dark, ratty, poster-ridden room, they would talk politics and philosophy, standard teenage fashion.

Lord ended up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Patterson himself went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied computers, his fallback field. He had made music on them in high school, and, in fact, at Berkeley. “I started changing my major to be a combination of music and computers. Two years into it I really got frustrated with the high pressure and decided to transfer to U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s right on the beach, a laid-back community. Everyone drives, like, five miles under the speed limit.” Beyond that, members of the Ugly Mugs had moved there, and in Patterson’s opinion, the school itself was “really great.”

David Huffman taught there. In a certain niche of computerdom, Huffman was famous as the creator of Huffman coding, a compression routine that software products such as Stacker use to double the space available on hard drives. Music isn’t exactly a low-bandwidth use of the Net. Compression routines of one kind or another are de rigueurrigueur for the transmission of high-quality sound—not just because of the space that the material requiresrequires, but also because big files take longer to transmit.

At the time Patterson moved to Santa Cruz, he wasn’t using Hoffman compression on the Net or posting CD-quality sound from hundreds of musicians through an IUMA-style operation. But like other techies, he was posting files in the synthesized MIDI format. “The stuff I put up there, it sounded like a bad Casio keyboard playing our songs. It really wasn’t very representative at all. I’d just sit there at my computer, compose ’em on the computer, and upload ’em on the Net. I posted them to a couple of news groups, like alt.binaries.sound and things like that and basically got no response at all.”

Jeff Patterson was reading the supermodel newsgroup when he saw a posting from Rob Lord in favor of Kate Moss, the model that so many of the regulars considered too bony. Patterson replied. “We were both huge Kate Moss fans.” Lord sent him some e-mail talking about how Kate Moss should be the “queen of supermodels.” People on the Net have a custom of leaving “signatures” at the bottom of messages—places where they may post their address or phone number, or an I-don’t-speak-for-IBM disclaimer, or quote somebody to support them or deride them—and Patterson took quick notice of Lord’s “.sig.” It alluded to “MPEG Audio Compression, 16 to 1 CD Quality.”

“And,” Patterson recalled, “I was like, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ So I e-mailed him back talking about getting together some Moss pictures, and in passing I asked him about MPEG compression.” MPEG stood for Motion Picture Expert Group—engineers who set standards for audio and video compression. Growing curious, Patterson downloaded software so he could play MPEG through his sound card. The results delighted him, and he spread the news to the other Ugly Mugs. Hey, guys, Patterson said in effect, what if we put our music on the Internet? “They thought it was a pretty good idea. So we decided to chip in together and go ahead and buy the software that we needed to compress MPEG files, because you could get that player for free, but the compressor cost $100. Rob came over to my house, and I told him we were putting our band on the Net, and he was all excited about the whole idea of creating this archive of bands on the Net.“ But of course! Rave-think could reach cyberspace.

Something was evident here, something obvious to me, but perhaps not to all the bluenoses and prudish, power-fixated bureaucrats. Patterson and Lord were proving the old wisdom that hormones could drive technology on the Net, or at least the applied variety.

The wizardry of MPEG would be useless if people didn’t use it. And it took a meeting of Patterson and Lord in the supermodel group—not one devoted to Bible study, or to paeans to Bill Clinton or Al Gore, or to the mandarins of Singapore—for IUMAIUMA to give MPEG one of its biggest boosts on the Net. Why, horror of horrors, Patterson and Lord just may have wanted to scan and swap copyrighted photos of Kate Moss. One way or another MPEG would become important on the Net, but thanks to people like these two, it was happening far faster than it would have otherwise. Technology was at odds with the vested interests of record companies, and they knew it.

At around the same time IUMA was getting under way in fall 1993, lobbyists for the companies and performing artists were fighting for laws that could lead to onerous pay-per-listen schemes—while publishers were trying to lay the basis for pay-per-read. Indeed, business people and creators should receive fair compensation, especially the creators; but in the zeal to protect major political contributors from the entertainment industry, bureaucrats and lawyers could imperil technology in the most lethal of ways. Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, would prove it later with a stunningly oppressive proposal called the Green Paper, a technophobic lawyer’s wetdream, a techie’s nightmare.

The first song the Ugly Mugs put on the Net was called ”Arbeit Macht Frei”—German for “Work will make you free.” A punky carnival song, it sparked an instant debate on free speech.

Asked about the title, Patterson told me, “It was kind of born out of our frustration of, ‘In order to have the money to do everything that we want to do, we have to work, but if we work, we can’t do anything we want to do.’ So it was kind of like commenting on people’s attitude of, ‘If you work you’ll be able to do what you want to do,’ when actually you won’t be able to do what you want to, because you’ll be working.working. Actually it wasn’t a smart song title. It was a phrase that was over the gate on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Unfortunately, people took it to be this Nazi song, which is actually completely the opposite of what we meant.

“We got responses from people who flamed me because they thought it was extremely cruel to be using this as a name for a song and taking it all lighthearted when it actually meant something serious to a lot of people. Whenever anyone actually wrote to me, I usually sent them back the lyrics and explained our stance, why it was called that. It definitely created enough of a stir among the few people who heard it. You wonder if a label would ever take a chance with something like that.”

On the Net, however, “Arbeit Macht Frei” would find its audience. A man from Turkey asked for a full demo tape—unavailable—and more songs. Other Netfolks wrote in from Texas, Florida, and elsewhere in the States, some of whom said more or less: “You know, wow, I’m a Zappa fan and I can hear the influence. It’s pretty cool.” The Net, in character, was blurring distinctions between artists and fans and helping the two groups mix. “We realized we had something,” Patterson told me. “Like, ‘Jeez, we got these responses to a band that had never played anywhere and didn’t have a tape out.’ So we started grabbing a couple of our friends’ bands—like my roommate’s. And we put Rob’s roommate’s band up there, and we just kind of kept grabbing bands to put up. And slowly everyone was getting one or two responses to what they had posted. And we needed a place to actually keep all this music. There were like four bands maybe at that time.”

Patterson, however, quickly filled up all the disk space available to him at his commercial Internet provider, Netcom; so he and Lord contacted their university and asked if they could store the music there. “Well, it turned out that the guy who was in charge of running the FTP site was a musician—he was in four bands—and he said, ‘Sure, go for it.’ And we put his four bands up there.”

The technology would have seemed infuriatingly hard to the world at large. You couldn’t just hook into the World Wide Web, point and click your way to the IUMA archives, and choose the song you wanted; no, you had to do FTP, short for File Transfer Protocol, threading your way through the big hard drives at Santa Cruz, until you reached the subdirectory with the music. And then, with most software, you had to type out the file names. Patterson and Lord didn’t even start out with postings on Gopher (which, to be grossly simplistic, is a more primitive version of the Web).

Even back then, however, the two were thinking about the Net equivalent of album covers or of the J cards that record companies used to tout cassettes. In other words they didn’t just post files of sound alone. They also pondered the use of files with pictures that music fans could download.

“At this point,” Patterson said, “it was still just a fun project. We didn’t think about making it a money-making venture at that point. We were just like, you know, ‘Let’s put bands up and see what we can do to mess with the record industry.’ We had this attitude like, ‘We’ll cut out waste in the industry.’ At that time there was, like, no press about us, so we weren’t really vocal, but we had those attitudes. We were kind of like naive and rebellious.”

Then an event happened that was almost as significant to IUMA as was the discovery of MPEG. Lord discovered the World Wide Web. “None of us,” Patterson recalled, “had any clue what it was. I think it was in December of ’93 that we got a hold of a copy of Mosaic.” They tried it out in a faculty lounge at U.C. Santa Cruz. “There wasn’t really much content on the Web at all. It was pretty much, like, weather satellites. We realized from that point on that we could really do something with taking the music and the pictures and using the World Wide Web as the way to present everything. People would be able to look at the album cover, read the text, see ‘play’ buttons. You know, press the play button, hear the music, and all that sort of thing.

“So,” Patterson said, “we called up the guy we knew from maintaining the FTP archives at U.C. Santa Cruz, and asked him what he knew about the World Wide Web.” Overnight he learned how to set IUMA up on the Web. His name was Jon Luini, and he would become a partner in IUMA, the co-czars’ “Kaiser.”

Meanwhile IUMA’s popularity kept growing, and soon the archives landed on SunSite UNC, a big digital library sponsored by Sun Micro Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. IUMA would even make it to servers in Europe, so that people there could enjoy the music without tying up the trans-Atlantic connections. Other big companies, such as Silicon Graphics, took an interest in IUMA and donated computers and other gear.

But how were Patterson and Lord—and their musicians—going to make money off the Internet, where “free” was a religion and where commercial audio might be pirated? I loved the many legitimately free pleasures of the Net. It was truly for sharing. IUMA, of course, was offering lots of music at no charge. Via the World Wide Web, I myself was giving away a book chapter I’d written for a forthcoming information science collection; and I hoped that at least some material from NetWorld! would be retrievable without any money changing hands. But what to do about the darker side of “free?”

Sympathetic to the cash-short but clearly a realist, Lord told how casually kids copied computer games for each other. “There’s a complete underground going on,” he said, and he told how young hackers had secretly turned the IUMA archives into a site for stolen software. The mischief was hard to spot just by doing the usual check of the storage area.

“We deleted their stuff,” Lord recalled, “and left a note saying, ‘Leave us alone, you Rug Rats,’ because it was clear there were 13-year-olds doing it. Some of the biggest pirates in the world are younger than 15.”

His words rang true. Adolescents in the States were no match for the best pros abroad, but the teenaged pirates could still be awesomely well organized. One group of teens might crack the software. Another group might craft a slick screen telling who had defeated the protection. Lord told of a 13-year-old making $24,000 a year writing and selling shareware; and although the business was legitimate, this example showed the energy and brains out there among the young—in other words, the difficulty of fighting rip-offs.

Lord and Patterson were thinking about releasing IUMA offerings with digital identifiers that would make it easier to track down thieves. And yet another tack could be to design the music files that you could play only with the right digital keys. IUMA’s owners were of GenNet; they were more interested in relying on technology than law to thwart pirates.

Piracy is one reason why major record companies feel uneasy about the Internet. Unable to ignore so large a market, they want help in getting their message across to the strange, young denizens. Warner paid IUMA to put short samples of music online, along with pictures and information about the artists. It was similar to what Patterson and Lord were doing already.

Now, however, like many others, the two were looking ahead to new business models. Lord had a bunch of possibilities in mind.

One was that people would pay if they liked what they heard, and maybe even give in advance. Another was that they would receive little gifts——maybe clay cats?——for making donations.

Patterson, however, offered some models that were more conventional. Gasp, his comments even sounded like an actual business plan.

First, he said, he and Lord would take orders for CDs and tapes online for companies such as Tower Records. Then IUMA would go the next step. It would sell files of music electronically. Fans would be able to use Web browsers like Netscape to encrypt credit card numbers so hackers couldn’t intercept them. Eventually IUMA would sell music for instant listening without customers first having to transfer it to their hard disks. “There could be some kind of royalty treatment,” Patterson said. “You might pay two cents every time you listened to a song. Or you could just buy an album.” Some good possibilities existed here as long as no one gouged. If people could hear music with just a tiny investment up front, that might benefit new performers.

More immediately, IUMA was helping fledgling musicians and others by way of an informal support network. Sue Few, a Santa Cruz woman who’d formerly worked for record companies, went online with a newsletter called Sound Check and offered a stream of tips on subjects such as copyright law, musicians’ unions, royalties, and lining up bookings. “Booking people aren’t so bad, are they?” she wrote. “If they enjoy your tape and feel you’ll fit well with their customers, you’ll get booked—simple as that. So they don’t return your telephone calls—keep calling until you talk to a live person and still keep calling until you get an answer and a date from them.”

IUMA itself was a calling card of sorts. Record companies and clubs could cruise the archives looking for bands to sign up.

Most important of all, however, IUMA helped potential fans and musicians get together. At the time I toured the IUMA area you could check out offerings by “Last 15 Bands” just uploaded to the archives, by artist, by label, by location, and by song title. Or you could click on a database with a number of options. I myself wanted to know more about Scott Brookman, who had written “When I Die You Can’t Have My Organs,” and who, as a result of IUMA, had been on National Public Radio.

A digitized photo showed him to be a bearded man with glasses. Something white was against his face, though I couldn’t quite discern the shape. I hoped it wasn’t a stray from an anatomy lab.

Messages on the screen said IUMA would let Netfolks listen to Brookman’s “Organs” in stereo or mono. I clicked on the latter option and watched the bottom of my screen as it showed the number of bytes passing over the wires from a computer in California to my 486DX-class machine. Within 45 seconds I’d received a 119K file. In size it was equivalent to maybe 60 double-spaced, typewritten pages even though this was music not text.

“When I die,” the lyrics wafted out of my stereo hooked to the 486, “you can’t have my organs, though you think that you will need them ...” If I’d had the right software on my machine, I could have heard several minutes’ worth. The song was good even if, with my primitive sound software, it wasn’t even AM in audio quality. My rather untrained ears picked up a Loudon Wainwright-ish edge to the music. I made a mental note to myself. When I was off my book deadline, I’d do what I should have done in the first place and install the MPEG software whose existence had helped make IUMA possible. I had heard only a little cut in another format With MPEG I could have enjoyed three minutes’ worth, and in better fidelity.

In the IUMA area Brookman said, “Organs” was “from my latest cassette release, ‘They’ll Nickel and Dime You to Death.’” He thought of his music “as a bizarre mix of stylistic parody, satire, self-referential, and meta-songs, full of clever guitar riffs and daring vocal harmonies. I write about personal heroes, local history, teenage memories, bits of folklore, and sometimes I make fun of rock music (lovingly, of course). Usually the result is intentionally funny ...”

Brookman’s inevitable pitch for money was reasonable enough. “I hope you enjoy the song, and I really think you should get yourself a copy of ‘They’ll Nickel and Dime You to Death.’ Send a check for five bucks (no charge cards) made payable to Loser Records. That’s a full 60 minutes of awesome music for only $5. Where else, other than a used record store, can you find that kind of entertainment bargain? Here’s our address: Loser Records, P.O. Box 14719, Richmond, Virginia 23221.” Hey, I’d already enjoyed a bargain, his delightful little fan area. I would remember the name Brookman.

People could leave feedback and I brought up some. “My colleagues and I agree—what a scream!!” read a note from Virginia, where Brookman lived. “I think we’re going to track down your CD. Congrats on a nifty tune! It’s good to hear a local band ‘make it big.’” An Australian wrote in: “Heheheheh. Nice sense of humour.” None other than Jon Luini, Raiser of IUMA, said of “Organs”: “I cannot get this song out of my head! The sincerity around this song is a great combination with the odd nature of the lyrics, especially when combined with the folk feel of the music. It makes me feel like it should be included whenever people first get their driver’s license.”

Brookman’s electronic mail address was online, of course, together with those of listeners who had offered feedback. Anyone wanting to start a fan list focused on him would already have some names and e-mail addresses handy.

This was what the Net was so good for—not displaying Canteresque spam on behalf of Green Cards or pitches from CBS to join its fan club.

Small business actually enjoyed an advantage here. To CBS, fan mail must have been a nice a way of gauging the market. But the Brookmans of this world could go far beyond that and establish good rapport with fans, one by one—something for which the people at the CBS site would never have had time, given its volume. Small worked in other ways for Brookman. He or Loser Records (were they the same?) could do a short run of CDs and spread the news with minimum investment. Pressing a thousand CDs costs less than $2,000 nowadays. Combine that with the Net, and the music world just might be a little kinder to a young performer than it was in the days when Lord and Patterson were toiling away in the record stores back in Valencia.

Granted, a place in the IUMA archives was hardly a guarantee of success. A musician with the band Black Watch told me that she and her colleagues normally heard only from a fan or so a week. IUMA would not make a band instantly rich. On the other hand, she loved the feedback and encouragement that arrived from all over the world; and, we both thought, wasn’t that important, too—not just the money? The music was finding its way to those who loved it. Besides, in the end, all the small fry might add up. Lord said that instead of one Madonna there might be fifty—“Maybe it will no longer make sense to have even one.”^[3.2] Perhaps, I hoped, the money instead would reach the Black Watches.

Once Lord had predicted that in several years IUMA might be “a one- or two-digit percentage of the $9 billion music industry.”^[3.3] I didn’t know what would happen. Major record companies would surely be doing plenty on their own. And when I talked to Lord in April 1995, IUMA’s annual revenues were still in the low six figures. But that could change, quickly. No matter what happened, IUMA was brilliant for a niched world in which millions were rebelling against the any-color-if-it’s-black mindset.

We want just the right friends and spouse; the right home; the right coffee; the right newsgroups, now that they existed for all; and, yes, just the right music.

The same nichization is happening in the world of publishing—the Internet is home to hundreds if not thousands of electronic publications. So what’s a hometown paper to do? Just how is Time magazine responding? And in such strange times—normal times, actually, once they’ve been around long enough—what becomes of books, especially when you consider the digital piracy issue. In the next chapter I’ll lay out the problems and even suggest a few solutions.