Because I travel extensively I rely on family and friends to capture radio and TV footage on tape so I can listen or watch on my return home. With much of my pure listening time during car journeys and on flights I sometimes take a few CDs for those periods when I need to relax. Audio-tape is far too bulky, and needs yet another lump of hardware, whilst CDs are physically and content compact and play on my lap top. For me the primary limitation of the audio CD is efficiency and effectiveness. I have yet to find a CD with more than 30% of the music I actually like, and I know many people who construct their own audio-tapes from CD collections and tape tracks that contain only their specific choice of music. With the increasing availability of CD burners there is a growing number also doing this with CDs too. But I have refrained from going down this path for a number of practical reasons, and the desire to do something even more efficient, to carry all my favourite music with me at all times.

A partial answer to my dream came in the dual availability of a small shareware package that compresses and encodes CD music files into an MPEG format, and my lap top which has a 27Gbyte hard drive. The compressor allows, for example, the movie theme to AirForce One to be reduced down from its 55Mbytes CD format to about 4Mbytes. Today's CDs have a total capacity of around 650Mbyte and can accommodate 10 or more such movie themes. When MPEG encoded the capacity can be expanded to well over 100. So I decided to allocate several Gbyte of my lap top hard drive to my favourite music and I can now carry over 2000 tracks.

This all prompted me to look at the cost of cabinets and shelving in my house dedicated to the storage of CDs, audio and video tapes compared to the cost of hard drives. To my great surprise I have spent over ten times the amount I need for a 27Gbyte hard drive on wood, glass and plastic for audio tape and CD storage alone. My entire music collection will now fit onto a single drive. Given the rate of memory growth per $ expended, the same will be true of all my video material within a decade. So it looks like an interesting era for the bit producers, and I will be soon be having a furniture sale.

Until very recently the predominant search subjects on the net have been sex and health. Well now there is a new leader - music, and it is not just any kind of music - it is compressed MP3 format at about a minute a MByte - or about 10% of that for a CD. At trade shows across the planet MP3 players abound: in the pocket, on the belt, in the hand, in your bag, on your PC, integrated into your mobile phone, almost every permutation is heading your way. The first MP3 car radios are on sale in the USA with enough capacity for over 7000 pop tracks, and much more is to come. The next generation MP4 will realise even greater storage capacity whilst solid state memory is about to take a hike up in capacity and down in price and power consumption.

Searching for MP3 sites can be a real challenge, there are so many and they are so transient because many seem to be illegal and periodically get closed down. It is now hard not to be able to find the music you are looking for - it is out there somewhere - believe me. Despite the best efforts of the music industry and copyright lawyers world-wide, music bits have found freedom, and I suspect the lawyers might as well try and stop a tidal wave with a feather.

So far the sales of CDs don't seem to be impacted, but no doubt they have always undersold because of piracy, and it is only a matter of time before MP3 makes an impact. Unfortunately for this old industry there is far worse to come. Imagine the impact of a small MP3 player with a 10Mbit/s InfraRed port. Two people standing hip-to-hip, or a group sitting across a café table having coffee will be able to exchange hours of free listening in less than a minute. When the get in car, go to the office or home they will then be able to upload into multiple devices. So who will be buying CDs and tapes, and who will be making money? Perhaps a few collectors will continue to covet tapes and CDs in the same way some people still collect vinyl records today, but it is clearly a market just waiting to be toppled. The people who are going to make money will be the artists and recording studios who put their material on line. And those who sell music along with fashion items as a package with other goods and experiences look set to make the most of all. It will be a market limited by imagination rather than copyright and restrictive practices.

What chance encryption will protect an old industry that delighted in tripling the price of music when they made the transition from vinyl disc to CD? Not a lot! Every attempt to encrypt or limit the copying-on of music has so far failed with a software or hardware fix on the net within days of a system being announced. And there is always the hard-wired solution with analogue music out to digital encoder - just two PCs back to back. So this looks like pay back time in a big way - and more especially as the production costs for CDs was an order of magnitude less than that for vinyl records.

It is hard not to have seen or heard of the legal battle currently underway between the USA Music Industry and Napster the new on-line song swap company. But if you are not in the know, and have not tried this ingenious service and software, then here is an outline. If you have music files on your PC and you log onto the Napster site (www.napster.com), then through a software application download all your music files are made available to the rest of the planet and vice-versa. Every PC logged on to the net is available to you in terms of all the MP3 music files held can be downloaded. You can search by song, artist and composer, and the listing shown will indicate the size of file and the speed of modem connection. So you can choose the best sites and at a click download all the MP3 music files as you wish - for free. Of course the established music industry and artists see this as a great threat - how will they get paid - how will they avoid being defrauded? The answer is that a new business model is required, the old one is tired, out of date, and out of step with technology. When Sony introduced the VHS machine just over two decades ago the movie industry did all it could to prevent this new threat to their established business model and prosperity. Fortunately for them (and us) they failed, and today moviemakers enjoy more income from VHS sales and rentals than they ever did from the box office.

Will the music industry win the battle and turn off Napster? I doubt it, and we won't know for at least another 12 months, but even if they do we can rely on a succession of new service providers to keep this radical paradigm alive. For example, check out www.audiogalaxy.com, spinfrenzy.com, junglemonkey.net, napigator.com et al. If Napster is killed then it will quickly be replaced by ten more, and so on. There is even software that can realise the same function without any central server - and you can't take 100M individuals to court. And it won't stop at music, we already see sites such as gnutella.wego.com, scour.com and cutemx.com et al providing for music, photos, videos, spreadsheets and other file types. This new paradigm really is about a world where more bits are free than constrained, where we can choose to make what we own, produce, like or know available to everyone. To me it is the epitome of what the web is about - freedom.

So does this basic technology and new freedom pose a significant threat to anyone? I think not. It is likely to be about as damaging as the camera has been to the artists painting in oils, or the printing press to the writer, or indeed the PC to the magazine market. We have to imagine a world where we as individuals choose to make a given selection of all our material publicly accessible to the planet. Inside companies and their Intranets it is even more important that we take this very simple route to communication and meme propagation. This really is about moving away from a past of controlism and power to a future of sharing and being influential.

Being the way we are I suspect we are about to see a bloody battle to try and stop this imminent change, but the forces of control will ultimately fail as they are outnumbered by those seeking freedom. The individuals and organisations embracing this technology will become very influential, and collectively more powerful than most can imagine. Beyond music and movies I suspect that those providing servers may also be alarmed by the coming change as storage becomes distributed across the planet, and networking bypasses concentration. For you and I, the consumers, we can look forward to a far greater diversity of music at a significantly lower cost, with everyone able to afford to make there own tracks, put them on line, and perhaps even sell. For the old industry it looks like good night Vienna.

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