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To: limtex who wrote (4633)	2/1/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: jkb	Respond to of 60323

Thought this was an interesting article today on MP3. -Jay _______________ Lycos To Offer Online Music Search By Andrea Orr PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Lycos Inc (Nasdaq:LCOS - news), the second most visited hub on the Internet, will Monday launch a new service providing links to more than half a million online songs, from hits to small garage bands, recorded using the so-called MP3 technology. Company officials say Lycos expects the new service to attract more visitors to its site since none of the other major Internet directories offer such links, and smaller Web sites devoted strictly to online music do not have such extensive collections. Waltham, Mass.-Lycos will provide the music links through a joint venture with Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian company specializing in image and video compression technologies for the Internet. Fast Search has the largest online database of MP3 audio files, which enable fans to download CD-quality songs from the Internet onto their computers or portable ''MP3 players'', Lycos said. ''We took a look at what words people were most often searching for online, and within the Lycos network, 'MP3' was the second most often searched word, after 'sex,''' said a Lycos spokesman. Lycos said it hopes its new service will help organize and make it easier to locate the MP3 recordings that reside on a hodge podge of sites all over the Internet. The service, called MP3 Search, will enable users to search by keyword and obtain a list of all the links. The database will be updated hourly to minimize dead links. Despite their popularity, MP3 recordings are also highly controversial, since they can be used both legally or illegally, to distribute pirated recordings. More and more recording artists have begun supporting electronic distribution of their music, but others complain that unauthorized versions of their music is being made available online. Lycos said that since it will only be providing links to the recordings and not maintaining the actual database, the search results it provides will not distinguish between legal and illegal recordings.