The MP3 format and the trading of music on the Internet will destroy the music industry within the next two years. Fact is, the music business is counterproductive and ripe for change. The RIAA's attempt to kill off the Diamond Rio player was the last straw as far as public tolerance is concerned. The music industry, in a vain attempt to protect itself, killed the DAT format and has recently lobbied various governments to impose strict penalties for bootleggers.

Our own Congress has outlawed reverse engineering with the passage of a ludicrous electronic copyright bill. Now the record industry is experimenting on Canadians by trying to impose a $2.50 "royalty" tax on each blank CD-R disk sold. Once enough countries stupidly pass this kind of tax the industry will come to our Congress with precedent.

But it's already too late. MP3 bootlegging is rampant, and that's the record industry's own fault. It began with the self-imposed destruction of the singles business. Singles dominated the world right until the dawn of the CD and cassette. But singles on CD and cassette are impractical. Nowadays, a person usually has to shell out $16.95 for an entire CD, which seldom contains more than two decent songs. Most popular bands have been one-hit wonders, and the majority of them were incapable of ever producing an album full of songs. MP3 fills the gap.

To make matters worse for itself, the industry is overcharging for CDs, which should have been selling for less than $10 for at least the last five years. There's no rationale for a CD to cost more than a cassette--a linear medium with moving parts! Few record sellers will even discount CDs, because co-op advertising money would be pulled from these stores. This co-op ad money, paid by the record labels, has been used to prop up high prices. The public is sick of it.

Compound this with the general bad reputation recording companies have developed over the decades. Stories about how they rip off their own artists abound. Everyone has heard about bands that were never paid their royalties or that signed away their lives and got nothing in return. This industry has not endeared itself to the public.

Enter MP3, a compression method that turns a 3-minute song into 3MB of CD-quality audio that can be converted to a WAV file and burned on a CD-R. The trading of commercial tunes over the Net in this format is rampant. Take a look at IRC; do a /list *mp3* to witness the mania. (Go to www.mirc.com to download an excellent IRC client. For an MP3 player I suggest Winamp at www.winamp.com.)

I recently went on a couple of these sites and discovered that every single hit record on the Billboard chart could be illegally downloaded. The MP3 Web sites have been effectively shut down by the record companies, but real-time online lash-ups such as IRC can't be so easily stopped.

The best MP3 distributors are sending files from fake or hacked IP addresses that can't be traced back to the real sender. I'm told IRC is just the tip of the iceberg of potential bootlegging. The top IRC system, EFnet, can handle 40,000 to 50,000 simultaneous online users; ICQ can have 500,000. AOL can have a million! The trading of MP3s is unstoppable. The laws against it will do nothing.

More bad news: Most collectors of MP3s are the traditional young buyers between 12 and 24. The majority are minors, not subject to adult laws and unlikely to be prosecuted for distributing or collecting bootleg recordings. Some have CD burners, but most keep songs on their computers in MP3 format and play them natively. The latest Microsoft media player now handles MP3! I'd like to see what develops if the RIAA sues Microsoft over this. Meanwhile, those kids with CD burners make disks for their friends. A straw poll done at a private junior high school in Berkeley indicated that none of the kids had bought a CD in the past year.

More interesting is the sheer number of musicians who have embraced MP3 and use it as a marketing tool. This also has music industry execs spooked. They're losing control of the content and the channels of distribution. In short, they're toast.

I sure don't condone illegal activity, but I'm not surprised. This is a trend that a greedy, cavalier industry brought on itself. It expects morality from its customers while producing songs that advocate otherwise. Irony abounds. As far as I'm concerned, the music industry deserves the worst for what it did to DAT. Obliteration seems just.

The trading of MP3s is unstoppable. The laws against it will do nothing.