In the olden days, Web surfers starving for music were only able to read about their favorite artists. But as technology takes over, fans can do everything from sending e-mail and chatting directly with bands to downloading full versions of their favorite songs all through the power of the Internet.

A legion of new and established sites are giving both fans and musicians more freedom to interact and share music through a trend that’s changing the music industry.

Music on the Internet can be played in several ways, but it all starts by downloading a player, which is usually offered for free on various sites. The sites also offer recommendations for the software that is best suited for the particular operating system, whether it be Windows, Macintosh or Unix.

Listen.com, one of the premier new music sites, lists and reviews several downloadable music players. Each player’s description includes the formats it supports, be it MP3, Liquid Audio, MS Audio, or a2b. Another new site, Garageband.com, requires Web surfers to use Real Audio’s Real Player G2 to stream music. The player is available for free on Real’s Web site.

An emerging way to listen to digital music is on portable players such as the Rio 500 and the Lyra Portable MP3 Downloader/Player. These portable players allow users to create custom playlists of their favorite CD music, plus songs from the various Internet music sites

The evolution of music on the Internet continues to march forward with online music sites now becoming more specialized with the music, services and features they offer their users. Four of the hottest sites on the net today include Myplay.com, Listen.com, IUMA.com and Garageband.com, which offer free memberships, rewards and, best of all, free music.

Myplay.com

Myplay.com was founded by Doug Camplejohn and David Pakman and born out of two realizations: Downloading music from the Internet is still a problematic experience for users, and with the growth of the Internet, applications that were once found on local computers are migrating to the Web as services.

The service uses the Internet to help Internet surfers break away from the confines of using a single computer and also from overloading their hard drives with music files.

“Myplay is a very different digital music site from all the other ones,” Pakman says. “Myplay is focused on making the digital music experience much easier for consumers, giving people a place on the net to store and organize their music collection and a place to legally share playlists from their music collection with other people.”

The Web site simplifies the surfing experience by giving users a virtual locker, which can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet. The virtual locker contains 250 megabytes of space on the Web, which is the equivalent of 60 to 70 CD-quality songs.

“I think that Myplay’s best take away is that it’s easy to use. It’s really targeted at people who love music and not just people who are technologically savvy,” Pakman says. “Some of the highlights of the service are that by storing your music online, you can access it from anywhere, a lot like Hotmail. So that especially for college kids, when you’re traveling around from dorm room to dorm room or different computers throughout the day, your music collection stays with you, and it’s always accessible.”

After receiving the locker, users are allowed to acquire, store, organize and download digital music files through a music downloading directory, such as Listen.com. Free promotional tracks from Myplay’s music partners, tracks from the users hard drive and also songs that the user has digitized from his or her CD collection can all be added to his or her locker.

“About three quarters of all the tracks on the site are exclusive; you can’t find them anywhere else,” Pakman says. “And we’re doing that as just a benefit for customers of Myplay, and you’ll see that happen over time more and more.”

Another feature designed to take the frustration out of adding music to the member’s locker is the Myplay Drop Box.

“The Myplay Drop Box is a little application that you download that whenever you’re on a Web site anywhere in the world and you find an MP3 or another digital audio file, you drag and drop the URL right into the Drop Box and you let go and we move the track from where you found it right into your locker,” Pakman says. “It takes about a second, so there’s no downloading required anymore when you find music. You can fill your locker up, and when you get back to your locker, you just click play and your music plays.”

Members can then create personalized playlists with a single click, and are also able to download their playlist from their locker to a portable digital player, such as the Rio.

“If you’re hanging out in your room and you’re on your way to class and you want to grab 10 songs really quick, just plug your Rio in, check off 10 tracks and click download, and five minutes later, you’ve got your Rio filled with some of the music out of your locker,” Pakman says.

Another option is the instant playlist. Users conduct a search for “all” of a certain artist’s music. By simply hitting play or shuffle, they are able to listen to those tracks. Users are also given the option of having Myplay e-mail their playlists to friends through the “Invite Friends” feature, which was recently added to the site.

“We came up with a way for you to be able to share music legally, where you basically take the music in your locker, create a playlist of your favorite tunes and you can e-mail the playlist to anyone you want in the world, and they can listen to the playlist,” Pakman says. “They cannot take the music; they can listen to it by streaming it to them. So it’s kind of like creating your own radio station for all your friends.”

Other features of Myplay include links to liner notes and discographies of popular artists and individualized e-mail updates on free tracks and music news.

The future of Myplay will include more customization, such as adding skins to the lockers to change the look of the site. Myplay will also be offering a premium version of the service early next year. Users will be able to pay a monthly fee and receive more space for their lockers and other music related services.

“Myplay will always have a part of the service that’s free, but there will also be other features that are only available to our subscribers,” Pakman says. “We’re also looking at adding other categories of media to store in your locker. We really want Myplay to be the center of your entertainment universe, where you store and access all of your videos and music and games and things like that. So a lot of new features are coming.”

Listen.com

Listen.com, which opened to the public on June 21, prides itself on being the Internet’s first comprehensive directory of downloadable music.

The self-proclaimed “music download directory” helps users find only downloadable music files that are legally posted with the permission of the copyright holder. Listen.com monitors thousands of sites, listens to and reviews the music they find and attempts to make it easy for users to discover music that interests them.

“There are a lot of sites out there. There’s a lot of fragmentation. And what Listen.com does is make sense out of that fragmentation because we are a directory to all the music available for downloading,” says Nick Tangborn, editor in chief of Listen.com. “If you’re looking for a specific artist or just sort of want to troll around and find out what’s available in MP3 or Liquid Audio or whatever format, you can come to our site and search for it, and we’ll tell you where it is.

“We’ve indexed about 40,000 artists now, reviewed, edited, categorized and put in our data base from over 300 different archives and sites. Everything from MP3.com to some band sites,” he says.

Listen.com has a huge staff of writers and music lovers who review, categorize and test the links for artists in over 600 genres and sub-genres. Currently over 100,000 legally-licensed digital music files are categorized and reviewed by the Listen.com staff.

The site also provides links to downloads on either the artist’s site, the record label’s site or other commercial music sites.

“We’ve got a team of very talented writers and editors here — real obsessive music fans. People who don’t necessarily come from a traditional music journalism background but actually care deeply about music, have huge music collections, go see shows all the time, play in bands, that sort of thing,” Tangborn says. “And I think that really fuels the reviews.”

Tangborn is one of those obsessive music fans who is constantly going to shows checking out what’s new and what’s hot.

“It makes it tough to get up in the morning, but it’s absolutely worth it,” he says. “You can’t be out of touch sort of sitting at your computer all day long and looking down on the world of music from this ivory tower. You’ve got to be out at shows and see what’s going on.”

Listen.com features a series of four icons that inform users of the specific characteristics of certain tracks and artists. The “Listen Pick,” the editor’s pick, and “Hot Today,” the top 10 downloaded artists, are decided daily. “Big Shots” are the better-known artists found on the site, whereas “What’s New,” lists new music that has been recently added onto the site.

“One of the things we do is we identify our editor’s picks, which are things that reviewers really love,” Tangborn says. “Those things get a little more play. They show up in the newsletter. They show up on the front page.”

Members of Listen.com are also encouraged to vote or comment on the artists. Members can vote by ranking artists on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Users can also optionally submit comments up to 200 words in length.

Listen.com also gives artists a detail page. Featured on the page are reviews written by Listen.com’s staff of reviewers, member comments, song listings, file formats the artist’s music is available on, artists with a similar style and sound and the ability to begin downloading music.

“This is another convenient way to get music out from the artist standpoint,” Tangborn remarked. “Right now it is an amazing promotional medium. It’s a really easy way to get a single out and into people’s hands and into people’s ears without pressing a bunch of singles or CDs or without putting it on radio.”

Listen.com also has several things planned for the near future. “You’ll be seeing the directory get full of artists. We’re pumping in thousands of artists every week,” Tangborn boasts. “We are going to be the most comprehensive reference for downloadable music anywhere, and that’s really the number one goal right now.”

IUMA.com

IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive, is a site that is committed to independent musicians, boasting of being the place where actual musicians are watching out for each other. The site allows independent musicians to post their music onto the site.

“Where many sites blend well known content and unsigned content together, we focus exclusively on emerging artists and unsigned artists,” says Antony Brydon, general manager of IUMA. “And we believe that’s critical in serving the unsigned artists, not to bury them beneath a lot of well known content. That’s one thing that distinguishes us.”

The mission of IUMA is to bring together artists that are chasing the dream of a record deal and the millions of new music fans who wouldn’t be able to hear the artist’s music otherwise. By getting the music out, IUMA gives music fans a way to discover new music.

“What distinguishes us is our connection to the music industry,” he says. “We’re not just connecting the artists to their fans, we’re connecting them to over 500 independent labels.”

IUMA, which was a pioneer in the delivery of music on the Internet in 1993, is built on a foundation of nearly 5,000 artist Web sites, allowing these independent artists to provide their music to fans around the world via the Internet.

“I believe that it is very important to connect to the fans and build a fan base and to sell CDs online to a global audience, but I believe that it is also critical to be mapped up with a label that can take an interest in your music and promote you,” Brydon says. “We see ourselves as a matchmaker between our artists and the right labels.”

Through the “Artist Uplink,” IUMA offers artists the ability to customize a totally unique Web site on which all the band information, lyrics, tour dates, artist photos, images, artwork and MP3s can be posted. The artists can also create message boards and fan lists, sell CDs and receive e-mail from fans.

After creating a site, artists can list any number of albums, provide a brief description of the album and set a price on their work. Once listed, artist’s are required to send five copies of each album to IUMA and as soon as they are received, a “Buy-it!” button will appear on the artist’s site enabling their fans to purchase the album.

IUMA splits all profits from CD sales 50/50 with the artist.

“We give them the tools they need to create an entire Web site, not just a page. And we increasingly give them the tools to market themselves more effectively, tools to reach the industry, tools to reach their fans. We plan to grow that tool set. We have the luxury of over half of our staff being unsigned artists, so what they’re essentially doing is creating tools that they want to use as unsigned artists to promote their careers and then we roll it out to the whole group of artists,” Brydon observed.

He adds that the site also does deals to help promote the artists that do well in the mix. When an artist hits the Top 40, the site tries to syndicate the artist into Yahoo, Listen.com and Collegeclub.com.

One of IUMA’s features for members is the “Super Search,” which allows users to search the site by a specific keyword, or browse the site by the artist’s geographic location, music genre, upload date, or whether the artist’s music is for sale on the site or not.

Also featured on the site are New Arrivals to IUMA and the Top 10 downloads of the site, both of which are featured on the opening page.

“We want to see as much activity in the space … as many sites competing to serve the unsigned artist as possible, because it is what pushes the industry further along,” Brydon says. “We think there will be consolidation and there will be fewer sites two or three years from now, but we encourage the competition for now.

“I think that one or two sites, IUMA among them, will prove the most valuable to unsigned artists and will be left as the only sites for the unsigned artists.”

Brydon also sees a shift in the way music will be distributed in the future. “I think we’ll see something very similar to what we’ve seen with CDs and cassettes,” he says. “I think that CDs will persist for a long time ,but the majority of music will move digitally over the next 10 years.”

He adds that music on the Internet is only going to get easier.

“A very small percentage of people have the bandwidth necessary to download music very efficiently and the MP3 players and devices are in the early stages, but I think that things are going to move very, very quickly,” Brydon explains.

IUMA also has many things planned for the future, including an “Artists Only” section of the site, at which 25 percent of advertising revenue could be given back to artists.

“We think these sites the unsigned artists create are their Web sites, and they should be compensated for the banners that are shown,” Brydon says. “So we’ve kind of thrown the gauntlet down, and we hope that somebody answers it.”

Garageband.com

Garageband.com calls itself the only Internet site created by musicians for musicians and dedicated to music lovers. It identifies, cultivates and signs the best emerging bands, especially those located in cities and towns not located in major media centers.

The site was founded by Jerry Harrison, record producer and former member of the Talking Heads, Tom Zito, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and Amanda Lathroum Welsh, former head of research for Netcenter, a division of Netscape Communications.

Welsh is excited and proud of the site. “It’s an online music community that allows bands to get feedback on their work and allows music lovers to talk to the bands who are producing the work, about what it is that they do,” Welsh says.

“So in a lot of ways, it’s that communication. If you are a band, it is very rare and difficult I think to get unbiased feedback on what you are doing and if you are really into music, it’s hard to find new stuff and cutting edge stuff that you want to follow and listen to.”

Garageband’s focus is on identifying the best emerging artists based on the ratings and reviews of other musicians and music enthusiasts. The site invites aspiring artists in several genres to upload their music, where it will be reviewed and rated by music peers, using the LCE rating system.

The rating system recognizes quality of music and not just the quantity of votes. The system is based on a range of measurement comparisons which are designed to eliminate bias and lack of context that can skew other rating methods.

“It’s something that we worked on really hard to make sure that it was very fair and that it really came up with the best result,” Welsh says. “We’ve been tweaking it and making it even better to make sure that all of the input is good valid input.”

She says a lot of people have already used the system, and it will only continue to grow.

Artists can upload as many songs as they want, free of charge, but first they must review and rate at least two randomly selected and anonymous tracks submitted by other bands.

Music lovers are also encouraged to review and rate the bands they enjoy and feel are deserving of the recording contract. Each song submitted is reviewed the same number of times, so no one band receives more exposure than another.

The 50 songs receiving the best ratings will then advance to the second round for a “virtual battle of the bands.” Winners receive a $250,000 recording contract and will be matched up with proven producers and other music industry professionals who have joined Garageband.com’s Advisory Board.

At any time, one of the professional producers on Garageband’s Advisory Board can step in and sign a band on the spot.

The Advisory Board evaluates new talent and helps Garageband.com to build the best online music community, where up and coming artists meet with established professionals as equals and help each other to make better music. Sitting on Garageband’s advisory board is its chairman, Sir George Martin — the man who signed and produced virtually all of The Beatles’ recordings.

“Really what we’re trying to do is help find good bands,” Welsh says. “Those musicians that are further along in their careers, that are more developed as musicians, are going to appear at the top of the list. That said, the traditional recording industry has a great need for finding talented musicians and we’d like very much to offer that to them.”

The first contest concluded Tuesday, and starting in 2000, there will be a monthly battle.

Boondogs, a self-proclaimed roots-pop quartet from Little Rock, Ark., was awarded Garageband.com’s first six figure recording contract. Their track, “Carbon or Gold,” helped them to beat out more than 5,000 aspiring artists from around the globe.

The second contest is currently underway, and the company will announce the winner of the second contest early next year.

“I don’t think that it’s a sole promotional tool,” she adds. “We still have a firm belief in what the traditional recording industry does and believes that is important and valuable in developing a career, but at the same time there is absolutely no reason this couldn’t, and we will be adding features that will help bands do that, but our focus really is on communicating with the fan — allowing them to talk to people who want to listen to their music.”

Welsh sees Garageband as the future of finding emerging artists.

“I see the Internet as this very powerful tool that does two things in particular. It allows those musicians who don’t live in major media centers an opportunity to say ‘Hey, I’m here! What do you think about what I’m doing?’ And it allows people who listen to music and really want to find new bands have a voice in determining who they think those good bands are … so it’s pretty cool that so many people can have a say in what’s going on,” Welsh says.