Curious, I put my
cursor on Skin Tight by Soul Candy and hit "Save" to import the file to my
desktop. (Onscreen liner notes mentioned Kravitz as one of the band's
musical influences. Aha!) "Time remaining" for the download showed that I
had enough to run to the drugstore. Once the song had arrived, I saved it
to my hard disk and then clicked "Add" on MusicMatch to move it to my
playlist. I hit "Play" on the toolbar, and the song started right up. It
wasn't a bad tune -- these guys were definitely Kravitz wannabes -- and it
was CD quality. Cool!
Now I was determined to find Kravitz. But it was clear I wouldn't
find him at mp3.com, scour.net or any of the other legal sites that
offered songs authorized for MP3 distribution by the independent (read:
unknown) artists and their labels. In the interest of journalism (of
course), I decided to see just how easy it was to get the bootlegs. It's
illegal to give away copies of commercial music, even if you own the
original CD. (The 1992 Audio Home Recording Act allows consumers to make
one copy for persona l use -- copying a CD onto a cassette tape to play in
the car, for example.) But as the recording industry knows all too well,
copyright law is observed about as often as the speed limit. Result: a
vast online reserve of pirated music. What I didn't know was how hard it
was to tap into.
I steered my browser to oth.net, a
search engine for (mostly) bootleg MP3s that a friend had recommended to
me. I tried "Lenny Kravitz" again, and dozens of matches popped up. They
looked like long website addresses, but in fact they were strings of infor
mation specific to various ftp (file-transfer protocol) sites --
bare-bones Net destinations that I would soon learn are often easier to
contact outside your Web browser -- stocked with Kravitz and other
artists' MP3s.
My first instinct was just to click on the links, but in almost every
case nothing happened. Only one triggered an immediate download; after
nearly half an hour, Fly Away was pumping through my system. It was a
fluke. It soon became clear that if I was go ing to snag any of these
songs, I couldn't use my browser. I needed to use an FTP program made
specifically for downloading files from (and uploading to) ftp sites. (I
purged the illicit Fly Away from my hard disc.)
For a detailed breakdown of this step-by-step guide, look on 