Cohen would go from one week with a brand new band, driving around in a station wagon, to three months with the Who in a private plane complete with a bedroom and a shower. He dated one of the Who’s flight attendants, going out for every date in a different city. Although Cohen loved the music and much of the business, after several years the personalities began to take their toll on him.
“In 1984 I went to the Beverly Center with the guys from King Crimson and saw the movie Spinal Tap,” Cohen recounted. The next day he quit his job. “That movie was my life: on the road, dealing with dumb English bands.” But by then, a seed planted earlier had begun to sprout.
In 1982, while still at Warner, Cohen had been invited to join a committee alongside vice president Stan Cornyn to talk about the intersection between technology and music. Cohen found that Cornyn, who had a solid reputation throughout many parts of the industry, “was a futurist and was into imagining what the next cool thing would be.” They met to discuss ways to combine the Warner-owned (then highly successful) video game company Atari with music. They imagined discs of concerts with an assortment of bells and whistles, like guitars that changed sound with a mouse click. The committee lasted a year, until Atari got into trouble financially and was sold. But Cornyn and Cohen both still had the bug.
In 1986, Cornyn was running The Music Group, “the first interactive music label,” cofunded by media and technology giant Philips, and was developing a CD-ROM and the CD-i format that would play on your television set. The latter format was abandoned once it was realized that the image quality on computer screens was much lower than required for television. Cohen joined up to work on the CD-ROM format, and in 1992, he worked on the genre-defining CD-ROM for New World Order by Todd Rundgren, along with unreleased prototypes for Sting and David Bowie. Cornyn experimented successfully with enhanced CDs for other bands, including The Cranberries, but after ten years The Music Group had burned through a considerable stack of cash and it was pretty clear that the format was not feasible for a mass market. In December 1996, the company shut its doors. But there was an upside: much of the research that went into fitting rock videos into music CDs proved to be valuable as Web technology developed and proliferated.
By that time, the Web was already more popular than any of the projects the labels were funding themselves. Although the music business seemed as if it would contain the perfect companies to push forth and establish outposts on the new electronic frontier, most quarters of the record industry were less than sanguine about such prospects. Moving to the Web required a much greater conceptual leap for labels than did enhanced CDs, which were sold along with standard CDs and therefore required no change in the distribution model. The online world seemed geeky, unproven, and, as The Music Group showed, you could easily lose your shirt with the stuff. But technology just kept rolling on.
In 1987, in the sleepy but prosperous Southern town of Erlangen, Germany, the Institut Integrierte Schaltungen, a part of research giant Fraunhofer, joined forces with the University of Erlangan, under Professor Dieter Seitzer, to craft an algorithm that could be used to shrink video files to a manageable size for use with multimedia. The 1980s were a long way from the modern era of cheap, fast computer processors and high-storage capacities. In order to make digital pictures play, researchers found they had to do something with the enormous media files. A “codec,” short for “compression/decompression algorithm,” is what was used to do the job, by smartly stripping away as much data as possible from a given file, while scientifically working to keep sound and video quality as high as possible. The Institut, and scientists such as Karlheinz Brandeburg, finally settled on the code for the audio part of their task. After the code was submitted and approved by the International Standards Organization, it became known as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer–3.
The MP3 (as the name has been commonly shortened) encoding method got its power from using perceptual, or “psychoacoustic,” models that accounted for what listeners actually notice when they hear music or other sounds. Although the formula was crafted and ready to be used, it lay waiting for some kids to find it and shake things up.
While Patterson and Lord were discovering the joys of the Internet as a way of exposing The Ugly Mugs and other unsigned bands, and Cohen was developing enhanced CDs, Jim Griffin, chief technology officer at Geffen Records, was trying to build a bridge between the music industry and the Web. Griffin had moved into the world of music technology from a background in journalism. As a reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, he developed an interest in the ways that the computer was transforming the newspaper business. This interest led him to accept a job in Washington, D.C., tracking and advising newspaper clients on the ways of new media.
Griffin was eventually hired by Geffen because he was deemed a thought-leader who could assess and explain technological options. Griffin first gained credibility by convincing the company not to release enhanced CDs. After that, when he proposed ways for Geffen to experiment with Internet promotion, company executives were willing to do so, after some initial debate. Aerosmith’s unreleased “Head First” was the cut of choice. It was a giant leap for label-kind, and ironically it may have been a small step in the industry’s losing some of its control: a quick search of Napster shows that “Head First” is still floating around online today. The release was a controversial move, especially when Geffen’s owner, Universal, caught wind of it.
“The parent company was not pleased,” said Griffin. “They knew that this sort of thing was the future, but I think their goal was to slow it down, as opposed to speed it up, and here we were speeding it up.” Griffin was attempting to straddle the thin line that separated the corporate innovators from the anti-establishment.
David Weekly was on the other side of the divide that separated labels and fans. With deeply set eyes, a neat haircut, and an engaging, almost overly enunciated diction, Weekly was attending Stanford University to study computer science. It had been back at his father’s office in his hometown, Boston, well before college, that Weekly first witnessed the power of the Web. In 1994, his father, a software engineer, fired up a beta version of the early Mosaic browser. Although Weekly says he was at first “unimpressed” with the infant Web, after spending a half hour downloading some “cheesy-sounding” Hungarian folk music, he became excited by the notion of online distribution. His father concluded “someone’s going to make a lot of money figuring out how to compress all this stuff.” Even though he was struck by the potential, Weekly didn’t act on this encounter until after he graduated high school and arrived in Palo Alto.
Compared to the big-city excitement of Boston, the almost archetypal suburban sprawl of Palo Alto held few charms to engage the inquisitive Weekly. Despite being in the middle of the world’s hottest spot for computer development, he found Palo Alto “not very accommodating to the college student.” The town consisted mainly of “nice expensive restaurants, and nice expensive shops. There really weren’t too many places an under twenty-one student could hang out.” To fight the boredom, Weekly began to compose “various tunes, rhythms, jams” using software tools, a hobby he had begun in his last years at high school. After Weekly offered to share some of his compositions with a college friend, the friend suggested that he check out MP3s. Weekly had never heard of the format, but from his first download, he was bowled over by the possibilities that online music allowed.
“I’m not sure I could ever look at my computer the same way again,” Weekly said. “It was now my stereo.” The only thing lacking, he noticed, was somewhere reliable to find music of interest. Most of the online traders at that point relied on slow, fly-by-night FTP sites, so the work of actually tracking down music online, which usually involved finding scores of abandoned sites, made the process as maddening as it was exciting. Legitimate sites like Lord’s IUMA, which offered mostly unheard-of songs by undiscovered groups, did little to alleviate Weekly’s hunger for more popular music.
Having access to plenty of Stanford’s bandwidth, a workable computer, and ample networking skills, Weekly decided that he would host his own site and offer choice pieces from his own music collection, along with perks such as reviews, a chat room, tech advice, and pointers to music software. Soon downloads from his small, and relatively weak, computer grew so popular that they accounted for 80 percent of the university’s outgoing Internet traffic. As visitors poured in to download “Freshman” by Verve Pipe or “Jump Around”