So Galtney did what any entrepreneur out to make a buck off the Net would do: She made a porn music video.

Galtney's one-woman band, Erotic Trance, has two songs hosted on the MP3.com site: "Guilty as Sin" and "Sexual Fantasy." She describes her music as "racy pop songs" -- basically, synthesizer pop with explicit, come-hither lyrics -- and says that the porn music video fit naturally with the kind of music she was recording. Using a budget video-editing program, Galtney and her husband filmed some graphic porn using actors they knew, intercut it with video of herself breathily singing "Sexual Fantasy" and uploaded it to her personal Web site.

Galtney then publicized the video at a number of adult Web sites. The catch, however, was that if you wanted to watch the porn, you first had to download the song from MP3.com. The concept hit the jackpot: By mid-November, Erotic Trance had climbed into MP3.com's Top 40 chart for pop music, boasting up to 2,500 downloads a day and earning Galtney some $100 a day in payback money.

"You've got 100,000 artists on MP3.com," says Galtney. "How do you break out from the pack and generate interest? You've got to have something special no one has ever done before. With all this free music around, how do you make money?"

Galtney isn't the only person asking this question. It's the central problem plaguing just about every band and music business that has an online presence. MP3.com's innovative solution -- and savvy promotional hook -- was to directly compensate bands every time a visitor to MP3.com's artist pages listened to a song; the Payback for Playback program, which began in May, disburses a few pennies directly to the band every time a song is downloaded.

The program has become immensely popular -- MP3.com is now one of the few sites on the Web where posting your music for free can actually earn you hard cash in the bank -- and hugely profitable for the most popular bands. The top-earning band, 303 Infinity, has raked in over $150,000 this year already.

But the program has also intensified competition between bands jostling for those dollars. On MP3.com, bands are no longer just musicians; instead, they are becoming viciously cutthroat entrepreneurs. Each band strives to come up with the most novel way to drive traffic to their music and make it into the Top 40 charts. There are plenty of artists who are simply doing good, traditional marketing and promotion; but there are also unique ideas like porn videos and sexy come-ons, a proliferation of "download trading" and "download clubs," artist plagiarism and a variety of other tricks that smack of snake-oil salesmanship more than they do of pure artistry.

From a distance, the download traffic at MP3.com looks like a new kind of radio payola, writ for the digital age. This time, however, it's artist- rather than label-driven: It's the poor downtrodden artists who are now taking advantage of the system, and of each other, instead of letting fat-cat record companies take control of them. Like eBay entrepreneurs selling auction success kits or spammers selling DIY e-mail marketing kits, MP3.com's savvy bands are simply taking advantage of a system that's finally giving them a leg up.

Or, to be more cynical, they are learning that success on the Net simply requires a new kind of hucksterism, and that the quality of their music has little to do with making money.

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