WIRED FOR SOUND

Monday, Dec. 02, 1996 By MICHAEL KRANTZ
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For six years Phil Rosenthal pursued his rock-'n'-roll dream without much reward. He moved to Los Angeles. He started a Beatlesesque pop band, Twenty Cent Crush, and signed with the tiny label Not Lame Records. He cut a single, Sunday Girl, that was a hit in Finland, of all places. Stateside, however, his band was nowhere.

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Then last August, Rosenthal met Joe Seta and Nora Rothrock, proprietors of a site on the World Wide Web called Artists Underground www.aumusic.com) who invited the band to post a sound clip on their Website and participate in a live "computercast" concert. In September, Twenty Cent Crush made its cyberspace debut, playing a gig at L.A.'s Billboard Live that was piped directly onto the Web.

The rest is Net history. Nearly 2,000 rock fans logged on to hear that Billboard Live performance, and now the band is getting airtime in Japan, selling tapes in Boston and taking phone calls from major record labels. "It's incredible!" says Rosenthal. "We've got fan mail from Majorca. I mean, how do you get that?"

Over the Internet, of course. After studiously avoiding the info highway for most of the 1980s, the music industry is getting wired with a vengeance, and that's changing everything: how bands get heard, how performers develop followings, even how music gets distributed. In the past two years thousands of Websites catering to millions of fans have sprung into existence, from tiny one-computer home pages for garage bands in Montana to world-class monster sites like New York City-based N2K www.n2k.com) which offers thousands of titles, stages regular live Netcasts, and announced last week that it had hired legendary rock producer Phil Ramone to create a new, Net-oriented record label. "Music is the perfect resource to digitize," says N2K CEO Larry Rosen. "And the Internet could become the next big distribution medium."

Why the rush online? And why now? Part of the answer is technological. With stereo speakers and built-in CD players, today's multimedia computers have turned into surprisingly good sound systems. Throw in a telephone connection to the Internet, a fast modem and software like RealAudio 3.0 (which lets you hear "stereo-quality" sound in real time, as it downloads), and a world of online music opens up on your computer screen. With a higher-speed connection (via cable modem or isdn line), you can even see music videos and live Netcasts, which, while still pretty herky-jerky, are a decent way to catch a concert if you're a continent away and it isn't carried on MTV.

Part of the appeal of online music is economic. Electronic mail-order houses are one of the few businesses making money on the Web, and music CDs are among the biggest sellers (along with books, flowers and pornography). Buyers get to sample songs before they purchase, and they enjoy modest discounts (typical price: $9.95 a CD); sellers save a fortune on overhead and can carry a much wider selection of performers. Internet Underground Music Archive www.iuma.com) one of the pioneers in the online-music business, got its start peddling the CDs of unsigned bands that nobody had ever heard of. Today the seven-person company carries 1,000 bands (the current favorite: Kaka Pussy), draws more than a quarter of a million hits a day and brings in nearly $1 million a year.