Music-heads like me like to listen to alternative radio stations. We don't want to know exactly what we're going to hear next, but we do want it to be within a specific genre or mood that we're willing to specify. We can't get that on radio. And some of us, like me, are lazy. My large collection of CDs and LPs usually sits there untouched, and I am way too lazy to deal with MP3s or other downloads (besides, my wife is in the music business and would probably divorce me if I even loaded Napster onto my machine).

After a few weeks of having good-quality music available through the Internet in my home office, I found myself listening less and less to broadcast radio stations. The music selection just wasn't good enough, even in a big city like New York, and there's just too much yapping. Now I listen almost exclusively to music on the Internet.

Taken as a whole, Internet music services let you choose where you want to be on the continuum between explicit choice (your own recordings) and the elements of convenience, surprise and discovery (radio). No other type of music service, except possibly your own personal human DJ with an infinite record collection, can do this for you.

Inspired by this, I decided to take the next logical step. In the living room is our good stereo system; I built an Internet music component for it. I took an old clunker laptop computer that was gathering dust on a shelf, put it over by the good stereo and hooked it up. I call it my Broadband Audio Component (BAC). Now, if I want to listen to Internet music, I simply go over to the stereo, use the Web browser on the laptop to pick an Internet music station -- there are thousands of them -- and select AUX on the stereo. That's it.

Internet music is a tinkerer's game now. Web users have to be too aware of the underlying details of their Internet connections. But the ease with I created my own BAC tells me that soon the day will come when all of those details will fade into the background, and people will be able to just enjoy the music. Just as the Macintosh user interface made it no longer necessary for computer users to wallow in the details of file systems and interrupts, and just as cassette tapes let audio fans ignore the capstans, pinch rollers and NAB hubs of reel-to-reel, Broadband Audio Components will open up a whole new world of music without fuss and bother: A new world with virtually infinite possibilities for music and entertainment from around the world.

The Free Software Project
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