Jim Goodall knew it was illegal. But when the occasional craving for music struck, the 37-year-old graduate student helped himself to free songs on Internet file-sharing networks.
Then friends introduced Goodall to Rhapsody, an online service authorized by the record labels. Now, Rhapsody is the main source of music in his Santa Monica home. And file sharing? "I don't even think about it."
For the music industry, that's one down, 59,999,999 to go.
Goodall and about half a million other Americans pay $5 to $10 a month for services giving them access to a large online library of digital songs. By comparison, an estimated 60 million people in the United States tap Kazaa and other free file-sharing networks, which have mushroomed in popularity since they debuted in 1999.
That disparity, some critics say, shows how the recording industry blew its chance to capitalize on the online music revolution. As record labels and music publishers were releasing their works to fee-based services such as Rhapsody in fits and starts, people were moving at warp speed to unauthorized networks, including Napster and Kazaa, that let them copy songs free from other users' computers.
Still, the slowly growing ranks of converts such as Goodall underscore a key point: The revolution isn't solely about free songs. It's also about having entree to a vast, reliable collection of recorded music that isn't controlled by radio programmers, record-store stockers or major-label executives.
For Goodall, those benefits had more to do with his conversion from pirate to paying customer than moral qualms or fears about getting caught in the music industry's legal dragnet. Simply put, he thinks Rhapsody is worth the $10 he pays each month.
"I didn't find on the free services that they led me or tweaked my curiosity very much," said Goodall, who is studying social welfare at UCLA. With Rhapsody, "I'm introducing myself to tons of music because it's so easy."
He often starts by navigating to the electronic-music section of Rhapsody and entering the portion devoted to a musical subgenre called downtempo. The Rhapsody software suggests a few artists and albums, and Goodall picks a song to sample. If he likes it, he follows the links provided to the whole album, that musical genre or a related radio station, which will lead him to other artists to explore.
