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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ they were still being downloaded, to eliminate the usual frustrating wait before anything could be heard. The system was dubbed “RealAudio,” using the space-less conjunction favored by Net companies. To make it work for the slow modems of the time meant heavily compressing the audio file, stripping away a vast amount of information and leaving only the bare bones of sound. What you ended with usually resembled a scratchy low-fi AM radio. Even with its faults, the fact that RealAudio worked was an exciting beginning, and it was actually a very apt solution for talk-based radio and news shows. While some hard-core geeks conceivably would spend a night downloading a song by their favorite groups, few would do the same for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” But once the barrier of a huge download was eliminated, many listeners flocked to the Web to hear to their favorite shows at their convenience and search the archives of countless broadcasts.

      RealAudio’s main target was radio stations that wanted to make their broadcasts, usually talk, available. Glaser could see the difficulties of persuading the record labels to release their prized catalogs of songs and didn’t want to pursue music downloads just yet. Comparing streaming audio files for broadcast to downloading them for physical delivery, Glaser decided for two reasons to avoid the latter. The first reason was that low-power modems made downloading too onerous for the general public. The second, more persistent issue was that the owners of copyrights were unlikely to embrace the Net, “not for reasons of rational economic self-interest, but because the music industry operated in a hidebound, one might even say cartel-like, way.”

      Glaser described the attitude of the major record companies as “‘we have these physical pressing plants, why would we put anyone else in the distribution business?’” He could see that they didn’t want to let anyone else in “even though those new people might have grown their business. So, our philosophy was: let’s deliver the best possible consumer experience and focus on something that doesn’t have gatekeepers that can unilaterally determine whether or not we can get something going.” The reluctance of rights holders did not subside over time. Quite the contrary, he said, “now it’s the battle royale.”

      The radio strategy worked, and soon there were stations all over the world distributing programming on the Web, from hour-long specials to around-the-clock broadcasting. Web sites like CNET and HotWired were trying to use the Net to score points over old media by supplementing their written offerings with RealAudio interviews and reporting. Despite only-adequate sound, online offerings expanded beyond talk to music radio, and RealAudio also became the default format for previewing songs on sites such as Amazon.com. It wasn’t just in America, either. Envelope-pushing radio stations around the world began to broadcast their content over the Net. Expatriates from countries as far apart as Finland and Thailand were able to tune in to the music of their homelands, just as scattered American college alumni could stay tuned to their universities’ stations.

      Several generations later, RealAudio started to sound very good, especially over faster lines. Fidelity at slower settings was better, too. With its primacy established for streaming audio, the company next turned its focus to developing video on the Net. It changed its name to RealNetworks and filed for an IPO. On November 21, 1997, the company raised $37.5 million by selling 3 million shares.

      While video was the obvious progression from audio, and dominating the field a worthy goal, the company failed to see how popular downloadable music was becoming. It wasn’t until after the success of Winamp and Napster that RealNetworks would release RealJukebox, an MP3 player of its own. Though RealAudio convinced a generation of Net users that sound worked on the Web, it did not focus any efforts to build a business selling or distributing popular songs. That was where Liquid Audio stepped in.

      While Santa Cruz was the lush and isolated birthplace for IUMA’s portal for bands, there was another spot not far north whose rich mix of academic values, technical innovation, and do-it-yourself culture encouraged pushing all the limits of music, especially when it came to technology. If the semiconductor chip business was important enough to name the whole region “Silicon Valley,” the heady musical side of Palo Alto and neighboring Redwood City and Menlo Park was busy following its own path, and one would inevitably intersect the other.

      The sprawling suburbs, towns, and wooded hills southwest of the San Francisco Bay seemed to represent American innovation in the latter parts of the twentieth century. The area also defined experimentation, both technical and social, and was the birthplace of the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, though they later moved to the urban setting of San Francisco’s Haight Street. Despite plenty of upscale neighborhoods, from the sixties through the early nineties there was still room for bohemians and enclaves such as that of author Ken Kesey, whose regional “acid tests” (as well as LSD experiments conducted by Stanford) were crucial factors in launching the psychedelic movement of the sixties.

      “It’s a fertile area, that’s for sure,” said Liquid Audio CEO Gerry Kearby, pointing out that the trio of Stanford University, audio hardware manufacturer Ampex, and the Grateful Dead all combined to create an environment of audio exploration; his company brought together veterans from all three. The combination of music and the computer was simply inevitable, and there was not a more likely spot for propagation than the South Bay and its community of Deadhead engineers.

      “All that stuff sort of started with the Dead. They spent a lot of money trying to figure out how to make stuff sound better, and how to push the envelope,” said Kearby. “Bands like the Dead and companies like Ultrasound—the Dead’s PA company—were very involved in the transition of adding computers to the process of making music.”

      Because Ampex “was the greatest audio company in the world in the late ’70s and ’80s,” engineering products that are still in use today, Kearby says that the company was responsible for a convergence of audio engineers in the region. Ray Dolby, for instance, was working at Ampex when he developed his idea for noise reduction. “It’s no accident that I’m here, and many top engineers at Dolby and Liquid Audio came from Stanford,” said Kearby. Besides of its network of like-minded professionals with a penchant for experimentation, the environment was good for inspiration.

      Kearby’s contribution to the online world evolved from a rich collage of experience in the many sides of making music. He was born in Oklahoma, and his life was typical of many American rolling stones; his hometown was where he decided it would be. Though he attended college during the Vietnam War, Kearby was drafted into the Marines, losing the typical student exemption because he was too busy playing in rock bands and “forgot to go to classes.” He managed to avoid a Southeast Asian tour of duty and became drummer in a Corps band. There he saw a different type of action; he was required, he says, to play drums in the middle of a Washington “riot” while an angry mob pelted him with rocks.

      After his time in the service, Kearby resumed his studies at San Francisco State University without much direction—he refers to his time there as “majoring in the G.I. Bill.” (Actually, he earned a B.A. in broadcast management and audio engineering.) Back in San Francisco he helped some friends manage a recording studio and found that he enjoyed the work. Kearby became a sound engineer for bands like Jefferson Starship and the Grateful Dead until “after a couple of years it occurred to us that we were doing all the work, and the musicians were getting all the money.” During this period he was also actively teaching music to marching bands, a vocation he practiced for ten years.

      In the mid-’80s, as easy-to-use personal computers like the Apple Macintosh were gaining popularity, Kearby and some friends from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford realized that there would be a market for computer-controlled recording studios. They formed a company called Integrated Media Systems, which was quickly tapped by George Lucas to build his first professional digital recording studio. Kearby describes the development as almost happening by itself: “one day we woke up and found ourselves a high technology company.” By 1989, the company sold his digital audio workstation to the Swiss firm Studer Editech, and Kearby stayed on as VP of sales and marketing. After several СКАЧАТЬ