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To: Johnnie Memmonic who wrote (76072)	7/10/2000 6:40:39 AM
From: William Hunt	Respond to of 152472

The Future of Web Music: Listen on Your Cell Phone By THOMAS E. WEBER THE MUSIC BLARING from a van creeping along the streets of San Diego last month sounded ordinary, but the vehicle wasn't picking up a local radio station. It was tuning into MP3 files stored on the Web and downloading the songs over a high-speed wireless connection. The performance was a demonstration meant to dazzle the audience at a conference hosted by MP3.com, but to many it represents the future. More and more Internet companies are betting that the wireless Web and the online music scene will collide. Even as the music industry debates the impact of digital swap-meets like Napster and Gnutella, the next new technology is beginning to coalesce. Music and the Web have already melded, and eventually wireless connections will put the Net everywhere. So, the thinking goes, digital music will soon be everywhere, too -- cut loose from its PC anchor and available on all sorts of wireless gadgets. Don't plan on surfing the Web's musical offerings from your cell phone anytime soon. The necessary high-speed wireless networks aren't available yet. But if this vision pans out, it promises to further roil the music industry, remaking the landscape for musicians, record companies, radio stations and listeners. MICHAEL ROBERTSON, CEO of MP3.com, dreams of a day when you'll be able to listen to any song in your collection from wherever you want. No more schlepping CDs from the house to the car or picking out the right tape to take to the gym. With every album you own stored as digital files on a server somewhere, you'll get instant access from any Web connection, including high-speed cell-phone links. Join Tom Weber for a live discussion on online music, Monday at 2 p.m. EDT or a bulletin-board discussion with Tom Weber and other Interactive Journal readers. MP3.com has already developed the technology to manage all those music collections. In January it rolled out My.MP3.com, a free service that let users store their CDs online. But MP3.com was soon besieged by copyright suits, and lately Mr. Robertson has been working to iron out settlements. Given the turmoil in the online music world, why worry now about wireless technologies that won't arrive for years? One reason is the automobile. Web music won't be truly mainstream until it's easy to take your tunes on the road. Though many fans have amassed huge song collections on their PCs, listening to them in a car means "burning" them back onto CDs or transferring them onto a high-priced MP3 car stereo. Wireless connections could bridge the gap between home and car. They might even provide some relief from the music industry's copyright woes by creating an incentive to use systems sanctioned by recording companies. With systems like Napster and Gnutella, users download music files from fellow users' PCs. No matter how fast your Net link is, if the other users lack top-notch connections, downloads can be painfully slow or terminate unexpectedly. Getting Web-based music to work dependably over wireless connections won't be easy. Industry executives speculate that despite "free" music's allure, consumers on wireless connections will be willing to pay for access to reliable, high-quality music servers. They could pay monthly fees or agree to listen to targeted ads between songs. UNFORTUNATELY, TODAY'S wireless systems aren't even close to being able to handle the flood of data needed to transmit music files. Many cell-phone users consider themselves lucky to make a call without being disconnected. Wireless networks won't reach the necessary speeds until the arrival of so-called 3G, or third-generation, systems. The networks are slated to roll out in Japan next year, but the U.S. is expected to lag behind because of the investments needed to upgrade networks. You can e-mail Mr. Weber at tweber@wsj.com or visit the E-World Center. With blazing speeds still years ahead, most companies plan a steady evolution in technology. Portable MP3 players are already available, but loading them with songs requires plugging them into a PC. Web music experts, predicting a rapid convergence of gadgets, say cell phones will soon come with built-in MP3 players. Qualcomm has already begun building MP3 circuitry into its cell-phone computer chips. When phones with the chips become available next year, consumers will be able to zap music files onto them via their PCs. At i2Go.com, a music-technology start-up, CEO Sam Johnson believes convergence will begin almost immediately. Today's cell-phone speeds aren't fast enough to pull songs off the Net, but they're good enough to call up simple Web pages. So Mr. Johnson is developing systems that would let consumers browse song lists on the phone's screen and mark specific tunes. The selections would be beamed back over the Net, and the songs would be loaded onto the phone's MP3 player when the owner plugs the phone into a PC. Receive e-mail notifying you of the latest publication of E-World. See the Personal Journal e-mail setup page for details on how to subscribe. Savos, based in New York, will begin testing an audio service later this summer that doesn't require a wireless Net connection. Users select audio programming from the Web and dial a special number from their cell phones. Computers at Savos pull the audio files from the Net, then play them over the standard cell-phone connection. Even if it does take a while for wireless technology to catch up with the demands of music, MP3.com's Mr. Robertson isn't worried. "There are so many people working to solve this problem that I have every confidence this is one technological hurdle we will clear," he says.