Downloading the future

Moving into a new millennium, the pace of life and change is accelerating at an unmerciful rate, throwing up all manner of wild and wonderful new ideas and possibilities. And an awful lot of other stuff will be dumped in the passe bin.

Among the rubbish will be quaint old expressions like "nothing in life is free". Surfing the Internet, you can get quite a lot free - free love for a start, but also free records and films.

The future, of course, is with us (in fact, with new technologies the future seems to become the past before most people have even anticipated it). Logging on to a site like broadcast.com you get a fairly overwhelming array of options. You can listen to everything from phat rap to swing.

You can also download films free, though the experience isn't quite the same as watching a film in the cinema. You could probably move the couch over to the computer screen, dim the lights, dish up the popcorn and sneak a snog - a sort of virtual cinema experience.

Well, we may laugh, but people laughed at lot harder when the same idea was predicted with television.

What about the future of the television? Might we have to put telly in the bin too, as television programmes start going online? One of the first television programmes to go online was Visions of the World, a New Zealand programme. Some major broadcasters are already putting soaps up on websites now. Of course the television set won't be going in the bin, because we'll be online with our televisions. In fact, everything will be giving us Internet access: phones, game consoles and, coming soon, our clothes. Yes, any day now you could be putting on your sexy-wexy Internet-enabled knickers of an evening.

In a Sunday Business Post article last week, Dr Chris Coughlan, discussing "nanotechnology", explained: "Computer circuitry will be incorporated or woven into the actual fabric of our clothing . . . the computer is set to become a practical fashion accessory." In fact, it's set to happen here in Ireland, at the new European branch of MIT Media Lab - which will be based in Dublin.

Well, we might be looking forward to a future of high-tech outfits, but it won't be Utopia - as in perfect freedom. Somebody will have to make money, so someone will have to pay - us. Although perhaps for some things we'll pay a bit less than before. Increasingly bands are releasing their records online, in particular bands who haven't been signed. Which brings us back, for a moment, to the free world: with some sites you can actually download music free of charge (try www.cluas.com or www.thumped.com).

Alternatively, you can get pirate copies of works by bigger bands. Using MP3 compression technology, it is possible to post recordings on a site, and people who have the MP3 player software can download from the site, free. There's nothing new about pirating - just the technology - and the music industry is looking at ways to make the Internet less susceptible to it.

Which returns us, in turn, to making a bit of money through "e-commerce" initiatives. Using the same MP3 technology, David Bowie, TLC and Rage against the Machine, among others, have released music commercially on the Internet. And you can buy these albums online, but with a difference: there'll be no album as such.

Much like your pirating, you download the music on to your own computer. Only with record sales online, you'll have keyed in your credit-card number first, and the files are secured so that you can't pass them on to your friends. This development marks the dawn of Green shoppers' paradise - no need for packaging at all, not even a CD in sight: good clean record buying.

It also has the potential to make life cheaper for the record companies, with no distributors to pay and no retailer taking a piece of the profit.

The price of records may come down - or record-company executives might get even richer. Internet music sales are expected to top $5.2 billion by the year 2005. Last year online music sales (both downloading and the old-fashioned mail-ordering of CDs) turned over $170 million.

The technological revolution doesn't have to involve the Internet directly. In Britain Photo-Me - the company famed for its passport-photo booths - in conjunction with musicmaker.com is planning kiosks where you can buy customised CDs. Each kiosk will have a digital bank of 5,000 to 10,000 tracks, and customers will browse through a computerised menu and select a sample for their DIY CD, at a cost of 60p a track.

This sort of development has the music industry asking itself all sorts of questions about how music will be sold in the future.

Meanwhile, Hollywood might soon find itself asking the same questions about films. Film piracy is already an issue: this year, The Blair Witch Project and The Phantom Menace were among the films available on the Internet underground.

Through sightsound.com you can now legitimately download (to rent or buy) films. Next April, Metafilmics will release The Quantum Project, the first major made-for-the-Internet film - which will be available exclusively through sightsound.com. Watch this space . . . .