San Francisco Examiner, Sunday February 27, 1994 THE INTERNET IS A PUNK ROCKER NOW by Barry Walter Examiner Pop Music Critic UC Santa Cruz undergraduates Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson are showing off their favorite email letter in response to their computer creation, the Internet Underground Music Archive. The author offers hearty support laced with street-talking expletives and vitrol for the record companies, scorning music listeners whobought into the current obsessions with "alternative music," which he dismisses as just another marketing scheme. The writer reasons that Lord and Patterson's method of making music free to Internet computer network subscribers -- particularly if that music is thrown together by 16-year-olds who don't have a clue about commerciality -- is the "real alternative" to the "corporate spewage" of the record industry. The letter comes from Japan. "This guy understands our vision," says Patterson. With an estimated worldwide audience of 20 million Internet users at their disposal, Lord, 23, and Patterson, 20, would like to give music fans a much wider choice of songs. And if giving consumers that choice means the downfall of the record biz as we know it, all the better. The Internet Underground Music Archive distribution system allows untried acts to get their music heard around the globe for nearly nothing. By downloading music into the Internet, Lord and Patterson are offering a entirely new way of bringing together musicians and listeners, one that bypasses the profit-hungry middleman. It provides listeners the opportunity to give instant feeback directly to the musicians. And it allows musicians whose work is of marginal interest to the major record labels a chance to reach an international audience with little investment or artistic compromise. "All the ties between audiences and musicians have been made nearly impossible by the record companies," says Lord. "They always impose some distance, some shellacking between the two. We're circumventing that." Despite the cutting-edge technology, the concept couldn't be more punk. Lord and Patterson's archive takes the do-it-yourself mentality of the original independent label rockers and updates it for today's information superhighway. The process of cutting out the middleman is called "disintermediation" and it's got the entertainment industry both interested and worried. The idea is even starting to spread within the corporate mainstream. Last May, Blockbuster Entertainment, the country's largest video retailer, announced a collaboration with IBM to create CD manufacturing booths in its record stores. This would allow shoppers to order CDs that would be created on the spot, allowing stores to sell more obscure it doesn't keep in stock. This, of course, favors obscure artists on independent labels and circumvents the distribution system that big record companies have monopolized for decades. Warners flatly announced it didn't support the Blockbuster-IBM venture. Several other major label followed suit. But, MCA apparently deciding if you can't beat them, join them, is thinking of developing its own in-store CD-manufacturing system. According to Michael Tiemann, president of Cygnus Support, a software company with its own novel approach to distribution, what Lord and Patterson are offering is far more radical. "We're living in an information age, not a property age," he explains. People shouldn't see they guys as two hackers but as the start of a fundamental change in what entertainment will be like in the future. They are doing in music what my company is doing in software -- making it free in the hopes that people will pay for what they like. It's worked for us." Lord and Patterson are astonished that the record companies, with all their resources, have aloowed two college students to develop the prototype for the next method of music distribution. The music industry's reluctance to jump into the future may have to do with existing copyright laws. As it stands now, record companies do not get royalities when their products are played in public -- those funds go to songwriters and publishers. Before they tackle a new medium, record companies want copyright laws rewritten so they are paid for the use of their music, a revision that will give them even more power and profits. "You can bet that the record companies have full-time lobbyists working away at Congress to get the laws changed to accommodate changes brought on by the new technology," says Michael Stone, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who has help Lord and Patterson anticipate the possible legal battles they may encounter. "Once fiber-optic cables are hooked up to every home, you can kiss the record and video stores goodbye." Stone, Lord and Patterson are currently contemplating ways to pay song writers each time someone listens to their IUMA-stored music. (In the mean time, musician agree to wave these fees for the exposure Internet Underground Music Archive makes possible.) Because his room is a mess and his computer is already obsolete (it's 3 years old), Patterson elects to demonstrate how IUMA works on his housemate's equipment. He dials into the UC Santa Cruz computer via modem to get on the Internet. He connects to the World Wide Web, a way for computers to communicate with each other all across the world. By using Mosaic software, he clicks onto his archive's file with is stored on a computer at the University of North Carolina. Patterson calls up a list of song titles like Plasma Boy's "Toast," Deth Specula's "I Wanna Be Updated," and Scott Brookman's "When I Die You Can't Have My Organs." He clicks on to "Arbeit Macht Frei," a song by his own band, Ugly Mugs. He retireves a small photo and bio that briefly describes the music, the band and where it came from, as well as an address where the band can be contacted and where fans can order its music and merchandise. He clicks on the play button and, after a brief pause while the song is downloaded from the UNC computer, the tune plays over his housemates stereo. It sound like punk crossed with Frank Zappa. The archive hold nealt 20 songs, much of them from Santa Cruz, but also hailing from San Francisco, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oregon and Ontario. Much of the inspiration behind the archive comes from Patterson's struggles to get exposure for his own band and from the pair's frustration with commercial music. Both are computer and information science majors from Valencia, Los Angeles county, and are fans of hard-to-find underground acts. Although they contemplate way in which to turn IUMA into a money making venture, their main motivation was to give something free back to the Internet, a gesture known as "netiquette." "We both worked in record store and know what a sham it is to sell CDs for $15," says Lord. Both wonder aloud if their altruism is a product of living among the hippie enclaves of Santa Cruz. "We could make compilation CDs and distribute them through schools rather than Sam Goody," Lord muses. "The money could go to nonprofit organizations and the archive, and there's a possibility of connecting to the kind of dispensing machine IBM and Blockbuster are considering. We might not have to put a commercial spin on it to keep it going. If you send us a tape without a donation, we'll eventually get to it. If you give us $20 dollars we'll put it at the top of the list, which seems fair enough." In order to use the archive, you must subscribe to the Internet and have a soundcard, a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment that's already included in Macintosh computers. The pair have ideas that can't be implemented with current technology, but anticipate plenty of possibilities right around the corner. You'vr got to look past the music industry," Lord says, "even past the idea that there should be exclusionary styles of music like rock and jazz. All those divisions probably have a lot to do with how music has been distributed. We our system, you can have 50 competeing Madonnas, 50 competeing New Kids on the Block. When that's possible, do you even have a Madonna? Maybe it will no longer make sense to have one."