--Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's "12th Night"
Despite rock and roll, heavy
metal and rap, music has never strayed very far from the romantic
associations given to it by Duke Orsino.
If Britney Spears’ recent
MTV performance of “I'm a slave 4 U” is any indication of
trends, even rock and roll can qualify as romantic heat.
Yahoo says that the five top
music sites on the Web include Real,
MSN: Windows Media,
CDNow, MTV and MP3.
Each of them is loaded with music selections for sale, as
well as some free stuff.
When connections can be
sustained for more than a minute with either Real Player or Windows
Media Player, the real entertainment value of these sites becomes
clear. Theoretically, you can choose a hundred tracks to listen to
in a certain category, say Mood Music and enjoy constant listening
pleasure while you go about whatever else you do on your computer.
As I write this, I'm listening
to the first selection, New York, New York, which doesn't have quite
the beauty under Ernesto Cortazar's fingers as it did when Eddie
Duchin played it. At
least this time it made it all the way through a complete recording.
Earlier, I tried listening to
a string of smooth jazz selections and the downloads got stopped
either by network congestion or by slow access to the MP3 site, but
then it's 3:30 AM as I write this.
The World Wide Web has always
offered more than conventional media when it comes to up to the
minute information on artist, industry and label news.
The Librarians' Index to the
Internet has a page devoted to music
topics with directories, databases and specific resources in about
50 categories. These
range from every conceivable musical genre to musicians, musical
instruments, dance and symphony orchestras.
The summaries accompanying the links are especially useful.
Harmony Central is the owner and operator of
the most popular site on the Internet for musicians.
A page that that opens with music playing is provided by the
Classical Music Library of the WWW. Virtual Library at the Georgetown Preparatory
School. They also have
many useful resources for musicians, students of music and music
lovers.
The William and Gayle Cook
Music Library at the Indiana University School of Music has Worldwide Internet Music Resources
with
extensive information in a number of different categories. The information in each category is exceptionally
comprehensive. I was
unable to think of any musical topic that wasn't covered.
Those who want to get involved
in interactive discussions of music can access 39,000 threads going
on in the Newsgroups. They're
spread over 700 groups, listed by topic.
There's bound to be a newsgroup formed for any musical topic.
Numerous sites feature
specific musical genres. Some
of the best include:
Jazz lovers can enjoy
streaming video and live presentations, an updated list of "Hot
Picks," free downloads and "Fresh Reviews.
Harry's
Blues Lyrics Online
has collected the lyrics of
over 3000 blues songs, arranged by artist and title, with Real Audio
sound clips for half of the entries.
The Joseph Regenstein Library
at the University of Chicago has amassed a list of links to
institutions that have jazz and blues
archives.
Ceolas
is the most popular Celtic
music site on the net. It
also offers links to sites that have Midi collections of Celtic
tunes for download.
Classical Net
features reviews of more
than 1900 CDs, as well as
5500 files and over 3800 links to other
classical music web sites. They
have an incredible collection of information, like a Basic
Repertoire List for Building a Library of Classical Recordings, a
Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, Recommended Recordings,
A Guide to Composer Data & Works Lists and many links to other
classical music sites.
Andante
is a major site devoted to
classical music. The reference section includes a searchable
bibliography of more than 180,000 compositions, the Concise Grove
Dictionary of Music, and discographies.
Lovers of country music will
find a browsable and searchable annotated index of over 4600 country
music sites, including artists, festivals, events, management,
production, vendors, associations, publications, lyrics, venues, and
MP3 files at The Country
Music Club.
Folk
Music Home Page
provides a comprehensive and
well-maintained directory of folk music resources. Links to several
hundred folk artists, annotated lists of organizations; concerts and
venues; albums, lyrics, and songs; record labels; booking
information; where to find folk music in magazines and on the radio;
and discussion groups.
Rap fans will enjoy Davey D's
Hip-Hop Corner including news, articles,
interviews, chart information, photos, and message boards.
R&B Primer
is dedicated to promoting
Rhythm and Blues. They
provide information on R&B artists,
labels, a list of recommended books, brief editorials, suggestions
for a starter CD collection, RealAudio clips, discussion forums,
news, and a directory of annotated links.
Following in the aftermath of
Napster and Gnutella, both of which have fallen prey to copyright
infringement lawsuits by music publishers, a number of peer-to-peer
sites, like Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster, have provided software for
file sharers. Unlike Napster, who actually handled music transfers, these
newer outfits simply provide the software for users to share files
directly. That keeps
them from being sued by the recording industry, as Napster was, for
copyright infringement.
When I downloaded Morpheus
recently from Cnet, more than 22 million users
had already downloaded it from that source alone.
After installing it, I found over 600,000 users online
downloading 83,000 music items.
It’s now possible for anyone to find and download almost
any musical favorite.
Morpheus
allows users to search and find almost any type of digital file
(audio, video, photos, reference data, reports, documents, etc.)
through a secure peer-to-peer network unlike any other. Content,
service and application developers can use the Morpheus application
to distribute their works, products or goods using any third-party
digital rights management application.
There have been 9 million
downloads of Kazaa Media Desktop. Like Morpheus, the download is
relatively quick. Both
programs are about 1.3 Mb and take about 5 minutes to download.
At least 22 million Internet
users have felt that they should be able to download music from
others; and this doesn’t include the number of earlier users (Napster
and Gnutella) who may not have joined the Morpheus, Kazaa and
Grokster downloaders. These users must have felt that the music industry isn’t
entitled to all the profits they’ve enjoyed thanks to our taste
for sounds that move us.
"Maybe when words are
inadequate, music can express the feelings that we all have."
— Daniel Barenboim, 11
September 2001
