That's 7 billion greenbacks for a site that basically traffics in audio tracks created by tens of thousands of unknown bands and other wannabe recording artists. One wonders if there was some funny weed being passed around on the floor of the New York stock exchange that day. Probably not (the stock has since lost over half of its opening day value).

The advent of a network distribution paradigm that enables artists to directly deliver their own digital music files to a niche audience located at work or home, is about to revolutionize the recording industry yet again. Of course, in the rapid spin cycles of the media brainwash, this is already old news. But don't tell that to the global equities market looking to cash in on anything that just SOUNDS like it's the next hot item in the fantasy world of consume-everything.com.

Question: is MP3.COM the only site on the Net that will be able to profit from this monumental shift in music compression/distribution? No. They have a small market, one that, once the technology becomes more and more accessible to individuals, will make their "mediating" role as a clearinghouse for mp3 delivery less attractive (let's not forget that the Net, if it's about anything, is about disintermediation). What MP3.COM has going for it more than anything else, is a name. MP3, it ends up, is the most searched for word in the big search engines. More than the word SEX. One wonders what kind of market value a business called MP3SEXSEXSEX.COM would be worth. You would not even need a business plan, just a cool MP3SEXSEXSEX.COM logo, a website with endless links to pornographic audio tracks, and a compression technology that makes it easy to deliver the data over bandwidth-friendly pipes. Ready to invest in the future?

As you may already know, MP3, developed at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen, is short for "MPEG Audio Layer III" and covers audio compression only. According to Nomadworld

	In 1992, Fraunhofer's algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1. The MPEG-1 specification was published in 1993. The details for MPEG-2 were finalized in 1994 and the MPEG-2 specification was published in 1995. On January 26th, 1995 Fraunhofer applied for a patent for MP3 in the United States, and on November 26th, 1996, it was granted.

And history marches on. It didn't take long for the net-music underground to turn MP3 into the "ripping" technology of choice. Practicing a variation on what I have, in previous columns, called surf-sample-manipulate, a worldwide community of music aficionados, entrepreneurial rippers, audio artists and "narrative remixers" have used MP3 to bypass the corporate mentality that still spews the deceitful propaganda that artists need corporations and, more importantly, their lawyers, to protect them from other rip-off artists in the culture. This fear-mongering Corporate Protection Plan seems to go against the grain of what the web, as a delivery medium and engine for audience development, frees us all to do, and highlights how much the dominant system in place today really exists to protect those same corporate honchos and their lawyerly brethren.

In this regard, I'm impressed with how quickly the net-music underground has latched onto the ripping-effects of MP3 technology to transmit noncommercial music to various niche communities located throughout the electrosphere. Bypassing the banal hype-mentality of the corporate rock culture, network distributed sound now has a chance to become a kind of viral meme that intervenes within the mainstream mediascape in such a way that it alters the uni-directional marketing aura being fashioned by the commercial captains of consciousness. If someone wants to "sell-out" or "become absorbed," they can now do it on their own terms, interacting with their own niche-audience which, it just so happens, is often composed of other net-connected artists experimenting with the technology in similar ways.

Of course, one of the big issues that constantly gets discussed on panels focused on the MP3 "revolution," is copyright. Copyright has applications in paper and plastic culture because its objecthood is decidedly material. But with electronic hypermedia, the work's objecthood is decidedly virtual and infinitely reproducible with an ease of network distribution that is out of control. So to try and force the current copyright laws upon the network culture, as the copyright maximalists and recording industry lawyers are eager to do, is a bit crazy, and will not work in the context of net culture. I'd say that if you don't want your work to be reproduced and manipulated over the network spectrum, then don't put it on the web. Why use outmoded copyright laws to protect yourself from your potential audience?

One of the big problems in the MP3 world, as with most everything related to net-based "content" these days, is the shameful lack of innovation on behalf of the so-called recording "artists" who now have every opportunity to experiment with the web as its own medium, instead of basically repurposing old media in new media contexts. Of course, this has always been a problem in the techno arts as is evidenced by the McLuhan insight that the first content of any new medium must be a prior medium (for a more scholarly examination of this phenomenon as it relates to the new media, see Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's recent Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Anyone who has visited the multi-billion dollar company MP3.COM's web site knows that it's one of the least appealing music sites on the web, although some of the music and sound art you can find there is refreshingly anti-commercial and, in musical terms, valuable. But when it comes to exploring the web's potential to integrate music into a more immersive, language-enriched environment, they just don't get it.

This is why, in large part, a group of artists I worked with on a new web project called PHON:E:ME, decided to try and create another model for both audio-writing and net-based art. PHON:E:ME is an mp3 concept-art album with accompanying hyper:liner:notes and is located on a server at the Walker Arts Center's Gallery 9. The project was commissioned by Gallery 9 with additional support from the Australia Council for the Arts New Media Fund and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in Western Australia (the Jerome Foundation funded the production of the PHON:E:ME CD featuring my soundtrack collaboration with Erik Belgum).

Besides bringing together this network of institutional affiliates who were able to help offset some of the project's costs (which were unusually high for net-work art), there was something else that came together in this project, something that I would call an "orchestration of writerly effects" -- a loose confederation of network artists, writers, designers, DJs, programmers and curators, whose combined efforts were able to create a transformational narrative environment that, in the end, tells the story of how net culture is altering our received notions of authorship and originality, and how emerging digital artists are helping break down the boundaries between genres, between art and non-art and the various disciplines that have too often led to rigid compartmentalization and weak critical speculation.

Like the Holo-X project I wrote about earlier this year, the PHON:E:ME project at the Walker features the work of a group of writers who have opened themselves up to a more elaborate, multi-disciplinary, new media art practice that not only throws a monkey wrench into mainstream conceptions of what a writer is, but that also reconfigures some of the issues surrounding experimental narrative practice as a one-man (one-woman) show.

As Anne Burdick, who directed the project's interface design says:

	"Unlike the print paradigm, in which the making of books is basically an industrialized division of labor performed at the service of the writer/ing, the decisions made on the new media assembly line play a much greater role in the outcome of the finished product. This is due in part to the lack of conventions but also to the fact that each person's contribution cannot be discretely divvied up when it comes to shaping the final form. It's the really cool interplay between the programming, the interface, the sound, the performance and the writing - EACH MUTUALLY DEFINING - that is so damn great!!!! (to me)."

Me too. This way, each individual's contribution, whether that be Cam Merton and Tom Bland's artistic programming, Burdick's interface design, or the phonemic "remixes" of Belgum and Sydney-based DJ Brendan Palmer, can resonate with each other and with what is going on in cyberspace-at-large. Belgum's focus on the role of resonance in his "remix" helps accentuate the point:

	"Resonance, with its beautifully suited literary, musical, acoustic and linguistic (phonetic) connotations, seems to me a very rich resource and strangely absent from much western music, at least absent as a parameter that composers consider to be on par with pitch and rhythm."

Is the author-function in fact being reconfigured such that it translates more as a "network-resonance" than the product of an "individual genius"? This is a question the PHON:E:ME project is constantly reformulating. Jerome Rothenberg, whose poetics of "prophecy" declared the writer/artist a "sacred technician," has said (as "far back" as 1977), in relation to writerly performance:

	"...there is a continuum, rather than a barrier, between music & noise; between poetry & prose (the language of inspiration & the language of common & special discourse); between dance & normal locomotion (walking, running, jumping), and so on..."

The same holds true for sound design, interface design, hypertext design, shockwave programming and the alternative modes of cultural production that are now emerging on the net. Everything happens in the NOW as part of a shared research and development platform where the various network conductors involved in the project can finally begin orchestrating their own narrative remixes for whatever audience they happen to build within the context of a fluid community (one that, like a cloud, changes as it goes).

The 20th century move away from the idea of a "masterpiece" to one of transience, is still very much in play, especially on the web where the digital artist must offer a frank acknowledgment that in a tools-dependent economy of endless upgrades and changing browser standards, some net-work art will become obsolete soon after it is released into the online culture.

This suggests to us that the network writer-artist must always already reconfigure their practice into something beyond individual textual performance. The writer-artist, now morphed into a kind of network conductor who filters the various forms of resonance that fluidly play themselves out on the net, "becomes, increasingly, the surviving non-specialist in an age of technocracy" (to quote Rothenberg again).

Listen to Belgum, the DJ soundwriter, discuss his contribution to the PHON:E:ME project:

	"I do see myself as a writer, not as a composer. I just write for audio as well as for print. I would say I try to simply further articulate the various linguistic phenomena that occur in speech. And there's a whole range of possibilities with each text. The reading style of each writer determines what moves you make in the mix, in signal processing, in re-sampling of sounds, overdubbing, etc. Another thing is that it makes experimental writing appeal to a wider audience. On a personal level and on the level of a reader, there are many pieces of writing that I just didn't understand until I heard them read by the author. Or at least I didn't understand them at a level I was satisfied with."

In a global market capitalizing on individual greed and preference, where everybody wants to have their own YAHOO (I WANT MY MP3, screams the cover of the August Wired magazine), the subject of selling so-called net.art becomes the subject of overkill (why the rush?). Meanwhile, collaborating on net-work art projects and locating a distributed niche-audience willing to interact with the work, is what net-practice should remain focused on. Our MP3 site at the Walker may not be worth 7 billion dollars on the stock exchange, but then again, neither is MP3.COM.

Mark Amerika is the author of two novels, The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood. He is the creator of Alt-X Online Network and the project GRAMMATRON.

The PHON:E:ME project is located at the Walker Art Center's Gallery 9.