Since the recorded music industry began nearly 50 years ago, little has changed in the operation of getting music to the audience. The artist made the music, the record label funded the recording process, the record was mastered and duplicated, given to a distribution company, the label promoted the artist, the store bought from the distributor, and the public went to the record store to get the music. All a rather awkward and corporate route to be taken before art can become publicly accessible. What if artists were able to sell it to the public by themselves, bypassing the filters of corporate bottom-lining and mass advertising and share the money with nobody else? The Internet holds that possibility, and an audio compression technique known simply as "MP3" makes it more possible. Does it mean the death of the corporate music pipeline? Hardly.

MP3, as an acronym, is actually short for MPEG layer 3, which is actually an acronym for "Motion Picture Experts Group". MPEG is a group of audio and video experts who have designed methods to compress audio and video so it can be transferred through digital means more efficiently. Digital audio uses a fairly large amount of data (by today's standards) when it's encoded uncompressed. For example, it would take approximately 30 hours to "download" an entire audio CD through a modern 56k modem - a common way to access the Internet. Using MP3 compression on that same CD, it would take almost one-tenth of that time, with very little noticable difference in audio quality (though there is some). While it would still take 3 hours to download an entire CD, it would take only about 15 minutes to download a 5-minute song, hardly prohibitive for most 'net surfers. Unfortunately, this new compression technique has been recently misused as a way to pirate commercial music as well.

The glorious attraction MP3 holds to artists is that with some cheap web space, you can serve your own music to the public, set your own cost, keep all the money, and it's just as good as your own distribution company - the sound is just as good, and the same glory and fame is yours, right? Let me shoot 5 quick holes in that theory:

There are some wonderful things that MP3 and other audio compression has to offer, but it's been sorely misunderstood. For one, it wasn't designed for pirating commercial music. Unfortunately, in our I-want-everything-for-free society, it has taken to the underground and spread quickly, giving MP3 a bad rap. In terms of distributing your own music, the Internet has that capability, but how is anybody going to know how to get it? The mantra is familiar: play shows, get it played on the radio, make posters, hand out flyers, etc. Now your fans need to have an Internet-connected computer and won't have anything physical to show for their purchases.