Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music. John Alderman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 said. “Some people believe if we didn’t invent first oral and then written communication, there would be no fundamental difference between us and any other species on the planet.”

      He believed exploiting that difference was his destiny, an obsession begun at an early age. Uniting the computer and media was his interest since at least high school. “At a core level,” Glaser said, “I’ve always been a media junkie interested in the nexus between media communications infrastructure and interactive digital technology—the things that I’m working on now and with RealNetworks.” These interests and his entrepreneurial spirit coincided to give him the inspiration to create, and doggedly work to dominate, the field. In an environment filled with college-age youths willing to lose themselves completely to their work, Glaser was able to compete because he seems to have been born with a superhuman ability to juggle an astounding number of projects. He described an “intense focus” that one sometimes sees in college kids “when they first discover that they’re able to do things and have that kind of expressive impact—that you can stay up all night and write software that does something that’s never been done before.” Like a few other Energizer Bunny-like Microsoft alumni, Glaser has pushed himself far.

      Glaser embodied some interesting contradictions, which would inevitably carry over into the company he founded. The son of a psychiatric social worker and a printer from Yonkers, New York, Glaser was tirelessly devoted to social activism from his teens, during which time he leafleted for farm workers and organized against nuclear power. At Yale, while simultaneously working for three degrees (one in computer science and two in economics), he somehow found the energy to write a column and edit the editorial page of the Yale Daily News, lead the Campaign Against Militarism and the Draft, and run a small videogame company called Ivy Research. By the time he graduated in 1983, Glaser was a textbook workaholic, an attribute that primed him for success at Microsoft, as well as for running the Real-Networks juggernaut.

      A childhood incident seems to have set the spark that propelled him down this path. While in third grade, the young Glaser went with his New York classmates on a field trip to nearby Inwood Park, just outside the city, to visit the Native American caves where, into the ’50s, one could find arrowheads.

      “In addition to [the artifacts] there was a massive amount of garbage and pollution,” remembered Glaser. His class was disturbed by the conditions, and his teacher encouraged them to write the parks commissioner, bundling and sending the finished complaints. The commissioner soon sent his response, a letter that quoted some of Glaser’s text. The 8-year-old was very impressed by the power of interactive communication.

      In high school, this fascination would continue, and while he studied early computer science, Glaser and his classmates hooked up a terrestrial wired radio station, broadcasting by stringing wires within his high school, running from a room halfway between the gym and the cafeteria. “You could argue that I’m pursuing the same interests that go back twenty years, or thirty years to third grade, only on a larger scale.”

      After his incredibly busy performance at school, Microsoft was the only company fast enough for Glaser. He joined the company because he was impressed with the team there, and soon he rocketed to head several key projects, picking up on some of the main technologies that would drive the Net. “I was certainly very lucky from a timing standpoint,” he said, noting that he was involved with all the networking products for Microsoft in the late eighties and learned protocols such as TCP/IP (the technical underpinnings of the Internet). He was also in charge of multimedia consumer systems, which helped him understand a fair amount about hypermedia and interactive experience from the standpoint of the stand-alone PC.

      After Glaser’s departure from Microsoft, a good friend named Mitch Kapor, inventor of Lotus 1–2–3, convinced him to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which Kapor had cofounded with John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist. At the EFF meetings Glaser hooked up with Dave Farber, who would become the chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission. Glaser said about Farber: “if you use the plural, ‘fathers’ of the Internet, he’d certainly be in the Philadelphia Convention Hall picture.”

      Although Glaser also met people involved with developing interactive TV, he was not intrigued by that technology; he concluded that it “had no method, from either a technical or from a business standpoint, of bootstrapping itself.” It would not be able to take off—because it had no way of reaching the critical mass of viewer and broadcasters interested in making it succeed. But the Net, on the other hand, excited him with its potential. He believed it offered “an architectural solution for all the fundamental issues.” Namely, the distribution network was already developed enough to sustain momentum. “It was clear to me that through the whole phenomenon later called viral marketing this was going to unleash incredible impact,” Glaser said. “It was one of these snowballs moving downhill with incredible alacrity, so it seemed to me that if we could do the same thing for audio and video that Mosaic was doing for static text and images, that we would have a profound impact.”

      The Web would not spring to life without baby steps, so audio—low fidelity audio—was Glaser’s way of making the first move. With friends who had been involved in politics, he launched Progressive Networks, a company that would deliver highly compressed sound files in СКАЧАТЬ