Chances are, the answer is yes—MP3 sounds good. If your computer has decent audio, you'll find that Petty's "Free Girl Now"—available for download from MP3.com until midnight tonight—is very close to CD quality. (A streaming RealAudio version is also available, by way of comparison.) You'll need a good MP3 player, of course, which you can also download from the site. Sonique is our favorite on the Windows platform; on the Mac, try MacAMP or SoundApp. "Free Girl Now" is excellent, major-label music, offered for free, well in advance of the Echo album's April 13 release date. It makes us think there's something to the MP3 craze, after all.

But then there are the drawbacks, which continue to be substantial. Storage, for one: Petty's single is a 3.4MB file, insignificant in itself but cumulatively a consideration for anyone who plans to collect music on their hard drive. MP3 proponents would argue that storage is cheap and getting cheaper; moreover, Zip and Jaz drives present another option, as do Diamond Multimedia's (now Sonic Blue's) Rio and other companies' forthcoming MP3 portable players. Selection is another obstacle: despite Michael Robertson's indefatigable promotion of his popular MP3.com site, offerings like "Free Girl Now" are a rarity—most of the site is given over to musical unknowns. No problem, respond the advocates—just head on over to Lycos, where you can find virtually anything in the new format. The trouble is, most of the music on the Lycos search site is pirated, "ripped" from users' personal CD collections.

And therein lies the biggest drawback: the copyright issue. (Editor's Note: the emergence of Napster would soon bring this issue to the forefront.) It's all well and good, if predictable and naive, for someone like Chuck D of Public Enemy to say the record companies "have been pimping their technology on all of us for years," and for wishful fans to hope that music, like information, "wants to be free." There is no way the industry is going to roll over and die for MP3. Indeed, the Recording Industry Association of America's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is supported by virtually every major technology company. Many mainstream artists already release their music in secure formats (a2b, Liquid Audio) over the Web. In the meantime, MP3 represents a wonderful promotional tool for artists of a democratic bent.

There's no doubt MP3 has momentum behind it, though. The question is, whether this momentum is strong enough to force structural changes in the music industry. We think it may be, though not the sweeping revolution foreseen by the format's promoters. A more likely scenario is the parallel evolution of MP3 and SDMI as technology continues to advance; MP3 itself may be subsumed into a secure format eventually, although we think individual promotional releases like "Free Girl Now" will grow in popularity. Don't toss out your CDs just yet.

(Reviewed March 3, 1999)