Music in the key of `e'

The future of music? It seems to have arrived, folks. And you can forget about CDs and minidiscs and even such quaint notions as "singles" and "albums". Music in the 21st century is going to be firmly in the key of "e" - as in e-commerce. As music-lovers go online in their millions, music producers and distributors are struggling to get to grips with the new technologies which have already caused a revolution in the way people listen to, and store, music.

Like all the best revolutions, it began quietly. While everybody else huffed and puffed about how the Internet would change the world, an American outfit registered itself as Amazon.com and proceeded to do just that. Music lovers, dispirited by the rows and rows of Celine Dion and Boyzone at their local record shop, thought they'd died and gone to niche music heaven. Niche music is what record shops call music that rattles up between three and five per cent of the total till receipts. Online till receipts, however, began to tell a somewhat different story: jazz and classical sales accounted for 31 per cent of online album sales in the US last year - and if you've ever tried to order a jazz or classical back catalogue album of even modest obscurity from a record shop near you, you'll understand why. And while we're doing the figures bit, here's another one: the sale of CDs via the Internet grew by 400 per cent in 1998 alone, to reach a total figure of almost $225 million.

That music was being sold by the bucketload over the Internet was bad enough, but the recent appearance of a modest little electronic gizmo called an MP3 player really sounded a bum note with the music moguls. You can buy yourself an MP3 player for about £150. You spend a couple of hours figuring out how it works, and then you spend the rest of your life downloading music from the Internet - for free. The player has no moving parts, and weighs practically nothing, so you can jump up and down with delight while listening, into the bargain. At first only nerds and techies knew abut MP3, but when the number of downloads from the Internet hit the one billion mark last year - and with digital TV poised to bring similar technology into the living-rooms of the mass market well before we hit the year 2001 - the record company bosses realised that it was time to act.

But what to do? According to Gordon McConnell, author of a report on the state of play in the music industry called New Media, New Value published in Dublin this week by Andersen Consulting, nobody really knows. "For years the major players have covered their eyes and played `see no evil, hear no evil' on this one - but they seem to have woken up to the fact that the problem isn't going to go away," he says. "Digital technology is developing so fast that it's almost impossible to predict what will happen; but the crucial point about all this is that it has been consumer driven. New media will enrich and enhance traditional media. They represent a massive opportunity for the music industry. But the industry can no longer say `take it or leave it' to consumers. Consumers have market power which was unimaginable in 1969."

Baffling as it may seem to the majority of us, there's something about digital technology which smacks of giving the meek the ability to inherit the earth. Once you figure out how to make digital copies, you can make an unlimited number of them, each as perfect as the one before. In order to prevent the illegal copying of feature films from DVD, the movie industry spent a fortune coming up with protective codes related to different time-zones. But in October a Norwegian teenager cracked the codes and posted the solution on the Internet for all to see. In order to try and stop the MP3 pirates, the all-powerful Record Industry Association of America slapped a series of "cease and desist" orders on MP3 websites. But it was like trying to hack down a hydra: for every 100 sites they closed down, another 100 opened up. The notion of consumer Davids firing a hail of arrows at the Goliaths of the music business, and scoring a series of painful direct hits, is undeniably pleasing. Naturally, however, it's not quite that simple. In fact, the whole business of new media is so complex that it has given rise to a whole new branch of the legal profession as "intellectual property" lawyers try to figure out who owns art in the digital age. Nor is it just a case of "us" (the consumers) against "them" (the producers and distributors). One of the most successful online music providers in the US has been a website called listen.com, a sort of Yellow Pages of online music with a catalogue of some 40,000 artists. A cool site run by cool people for cool people? Sure. But not penniless indie types. Sony Music has invested $37 million, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, recently became a director.

So could this so-called revolution in the music business really be more of in the nature of a Cabinet reshuffle? "Certainly it's all about establishing control of the new media," says McConnell, whose own indie credentials are impeccable, for he once managed a series of garage bands, one of whom rejoiced in the name of The Voice of Cheese. "And in particular, the creation of some sort of encryption to prevent mass duplication." In 1998 the industry heavy gang got together to try to come up with some sort of controllable alternative to MP3. They're working on something called SDMI - Secure Digital Music Initiative - but whether the MP3 generation will be happy to pay for music when they've become accustomed to downloading it for free, is another of those Internet imponderables that not even the experts can answer.

Here in Ireland, meanwhile, MP3 players are still a rarity, but with 40 per cent of the 15-24 age group avidly online, and digital TV about to spread like wildfire across the land, it doubtless won't be long before we catch up. Enthusiastic young bands are already playing to the new market. There is, in Tuam, a band called The Tainted. They set up a website. They had 20,000 hits in a few months, and suddenly found themselves with radio play in Chicago and a fanclub in Italy. They haven't made any money yet - but one day, somebody will. And that's when we can all get ready to e-rock and e-roll.