In a funny kind of
way, Frankel's journey from digital underground to Internet mainstream
parallels the evolution of the online music business itself. Both started
in the hacker counterculture and were absorbed by a music industry eager
to cash in on a new distribution channel. Frankel's emergence as a
corporate minimogul riding a desk at AOL -- the company that defines the
Internet's sane middle ground -- may be as clear an indication of where
the digital-music scene is heading as any record-label initiatives,
musician revolts or new compression algorithms. And yet his uneasiness
about his new role also suggests that the struggle between the underground
and the commercial is far from over.
You have to go back to 1987 to find the thing that would change
everything in the music industry. That's when the German engineering firm
Fraunhofer Schaltungen devised a compression standard known as mpeg-1
Audio Layer 3, better known as MP3. The Germans were trying to solve a
vexing problem: how to broadcast digital audio. CD-quality sound files
were just too big and cumbersome. Fraunhofer Schaltungen figured out that
you could compress the files in a way that eliminated the extraneous
noise, but in tho se days of molasses-slow modems and processors nobody
thought this meant anything to PC users. Apply a few iterations of Moore's
law, throw in T1 lines and cable modems, and MP3 suddenly caught on big in
the mid-'90s with college students and tune-hungry techies. It became the
de facto standard for "ripping" CDs: You could take a music disc and
translate the songs into MP3, squeezing them down to a tenth their
uncompressed size -- small enough, that is, to pass around on the Net.
But before that could happen, people needed a better way to listen to
MP3s on their PCs. The software players available then used clunky Unix or
Windows interfaces without personality. At least that's what Frankel
thought during his two semesters at the University of Utah. While there,
he hardly left his 8-ft.-by-12-ft. room, hacking away on a Pentium 133
machine, eating too many Taco Bell Burrito Supremes and ripping,
uploading, downloading and listening to MP3s. When he quit school,
complaining of bored om and missing his family, and returned home to
Sedona, Ariz., it was MP3s that consumed him.
