Maybe not. On Friday, a Santa Cruz, Calif., start-up called AudioMill released the beta version of its new software, the BitBop tuner. AudioMill executives are billing it as the TiVo of Internet radio, and if they can pull off their ambitious plans, music fans stand to benefit greatly.

The AudioMill pitch is straightforward. There are thousands of streaming-audio radio stations online at any given moment. You tell the BitBop tuner what band or song you want to listen to and the software searches for stations that are either playing your song at that very moment or likely to do so soon. The BitBop tuner will not only play the song for you immediately but will also make a permanent copy of it on your hard drive.

Sound a lot like Napster? Conceptually, it is -- once again, it's a service that will find you the tune you want at the exact moment you want it. But there are several crucial differences. First, the quality of the songs is only as good as the quality of the stream, which, in the case of most online radio stations, is somewhere between 40 kbps and 128 kbps. As most 56 kbps dial-up modem users know, such speeds do not always make for a pristine musical experience. Second, right now, instant gratification isn't always possible. Unless you're looking for Britney or Eminem or Madonna, the odds are slim that even one of the thousands of stations will be playing your song this very second. Finally, BitBop encrypts the tune as it drops it onto your hard drive, so that you can only listen to it when you are seated at your computer and using your BitBop tuner (in other words, forget about burning it to a CD or putting it on your MP3 player).

Despite these drawbacks, the BitBop tuner is still a nifty service, one that the recording industry ought to embrace. In an era of corporate consolidation and pay-for-play payola, BitBop gives us what radio once promised but has failed to deliver: the ability to introduce listeners to new music beyond the same old, same old bland, cookie-cutter Top-40 industry-approved tunes. This should be manna from heaven for profit-hungry recording studios -- whenever fans are hearing new songs, they are also probably spending more money on music. BitBop could be yet another instance of the Net proving that it is the best thing that ever happened to music.

If, that is, the music-biz moguls are wise enough to let BitBop succeed. But that is far from certain. AudioMill's executives believe they are legally in the clear. But the laws surrounding Internet radio are, if anything, even murkier than those surrounding Napster-style peer-to-peer file swapping. In fact, just as AudioMill was launching, Streambox, an already-established competitor with a very similar business plan, pulled its free online streaming-audio search engine off the Web.

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