A New Spin

By Chris O''Malley

As music consumers, we're accustomed to living with some sour notes. Enticed by a hit single, we buy a compact disc only to find the rest of the album filled with moody self-indulgence. We have millions of vinyl records and eight-track tapes taking up space in our closets because electronics makers sold us on a digital future with no way to bring our analog past along for the ride. And speaking of rides, can't those gadget wizards replace our waning (in some climates, melting) cassette tapes with truly portable CDs that won't skip when we jog?

Happily, we may soon have fewer reasons to sing the blues. New music-recording and -delivery technologies are poised to give us more control over what we hear, where we hear it and even how much we pay for the privilege. Philips Electronics is selling a music CD recorder for about $600 that lets you copy an entire CD (or any other album) onto a new CD, produce your own greatest-hits collections from several albums or just bring those old LPs and cassette tapes into the digital age. Pioneer and Marantz will begin selling similar recorders this summer. Sony and Sharp are spearheading an effort to revive the MiniDisc format, which records digital music onto tiny discs inside cartridges smaller than a Post-it note. Then there's the wild card in the audio deck: computers. CD recorders for PCs cost as little as $300, and the Internet, to which more and more PCs are attached, is emerging as a hothouse for new music.

Most of these changes are occurring with only grudging acceptance from the people who produce and sell the music. "The music industry is still much closer to its artists than to its customers," says Paco Underhill of Envirosell Inc., a consumer-behavior research firm in New York City. Record companies, he observes, sell CDs exactly the same way they sold LPs: as one-size-fits-all package deals. Meanwhile, consumers with shrinking leisure hours and attention spans are demanding that their music be portable and personalized or at least varied. Movie sound tracks like the one from Titanic, for example, are scoring big, while such unlikely music retailers as Starbucks and the Gap are finding success selling their own themed compilations. "Five minutes of Mariah Carey? Sure," says Underhill, striking the new-music-buyer pose. "Forty-five minutes? I don't think so."

Your musical mileage may vary, of course. Some people actually like Mariah marathons. And indulging your taste in tunes is precisely the point of the new music recorders, although they make that point in distinctly different ways.

Music CD recorders are the most familiar of the lot. They look like standard CD players and can play standard CDs. But they also have the circuitry and lasers to burn music data onto blank CDs known as CD-Recordable or CD-ReWritable discs. (CD-Rs can be recorded on only once; CD-RWs are erasable and can be used again and again.) The resulting CDs sound as good as the originals and, in the case of CD-R discs, will play in any CD player; CD-RW discs require new players.

The catch? Blank music CDs are still expensive. CD-R music discs cost $6 to $10 apiece, CD-RW discs a whopping $18 to $25. That's thanks in part to a royalty agreement with the recording industry, which also requires that a special "copyright flag," or signal, be embedded on blank discs and that CD recorders accept only these flagged discs. That has kept the price of recordable CDs for music artificially high; virtually identical recordable CDs for computers by contrast are relatively cheap.

MiniDisc recorders, which have been big hits in Japan and parts of Europe, may be catching on in the U.S. There's relatively little prerecorded music available in the MiniDisc format, but Sony and others are pushing the MiniDisc for its ability to make recordings of existing CDs and its potential for replacing analog cassettes in portable or car audio systems. MiniDiscs are durable, easily erasable and fit into a shirt pocket. Blank discs cost $4 to $6 each.

But the MiniDisc format makes compromises in audio quality, using a data-compression method that renders it less accurate than CDs. At $300 to $500, MiniDisc recorders are less costly than full-size CD recorders but far pricier than the portable players they aim to displace.

With so many formats to choose among, is a VHS vs. Betamax-type standards war brewing? Could be. Some electronics companies are lining up behind one or another product, although many say they will probably sell them all. Other standard setters, such as Panasonic, don't sell any in the U.S. yet. For any recording scheme to go mainstream, it will have to get even cheaper and simpler, according to Chris Muratore, an analyst at Soundata, Inc., a market-research firm based in Hartsdale, N.Y. But there's clearly an appetite for recordable-music formats. According to Muratore's research, more than 90% of music buyers still use cassettes, and more than 30% of the cassettes they use are homemade.

Computer makers and webmasters aren't waiting for the music industry to sort things out. With the price of CD-R drives for PCs falling and CD-R blank computer discs (unburdened by copyright flags or royalties) selling for as little as a buck apiece, many computers are better equipped than home stereos to enter the digital-recording era. Even better recording technology is on its way: DVD-RAM and DVD-RW are erasable discs that can hold up to eight times as much data (or music) as CD-R discs. All this is not lost on the tech-wary music industry. "Recordable CDs have become the tool of choice for a new generation of music pirates," frets Cary Sherman, general counsel at the Recording Industry Association of America.

That may be true in some Third World black markets and college dormitories, but the buried treasure for most computer users is less likely to be found in pirating discs in someone's basement than in downloading music from the Internet. Most major record labels use their websites as promotional vehicles, letting you play 30-second teasers but not download entire songs. For acts that haven't cracked the Top 40, however, the Web is becoming fertile ground. At the Intel New York Music Festival last month, the chipmaker simulcast more than 300 live performances from 20 Manhattan clubs on the festival's website (at www.intelfest.com in hopes of stirring interest in digital-music delivery. Missed it? No problem. You can simply download selected tracks and--if you have a CD-R and software from a little company called Liquid Audio--save them on a blank CD.

Neither the Internet nor the music industry is ready to begin digital delivery of entire CDs, but music lovers of the wired generation may demand it. "Kids prize their computers more than their stereos," says Wendy Hafner, director of music marketing at Intel. Record companies "would have to be crazy not to take advantage of that," she says. Baby boomers who came of age transferring songs from LPs to cassettes--often in various kinds of smoke-filled rooms--can think of it as the '90s version of rolling your own.