You can't take it with you. Or can you? Analysis/Commentary Digital music, until now, has been a marooned art form: chained to a vinyl casing -- a CD or tape. If you're a runner, how many times have you been jogging along, bopping to the beat, humming to the rhythm, only to find that your tape player has jammed? Or have you ever listened to a scratched CD at a picnic? It sounds like a car's engine on a cold winter morning. Well, finito, no more fuss. No more tapes, no more platters. Digital music is increasingly stored on memory chips -- no gears, magnets or motors required. Portable devices are preparing to escape their traditional casings: the chain and ball of the PC, the unwieldy boom box, the tacky tape player and the fragile CD-ROM. Already Sony has announced the sale of digital Walkmans that store up to an hour of MP3 music that you can download from the computer and take with you everywhere. And the storehouse of free and paid content -- Net music downloads -- increases every day, approaching its hour of critical mass. Who knows, maybe 2000 is the year that digital music will go portable. One problem with digital music is that it's data-heavy. It needs to be compressed for transition for the trip from source to destination. MP3, a digital format, employs a "codec" algorithm, a compression-decompression procedure that allows music to start off data-heavy, typically in its original digital or analog format, then travel light to a player, where it resumes its density as output. Software companies experimented in the past few years with various formats until they hit upon MP3, which promises a degree of stability. Now the content providers, the record companies and artists, are moving to upgrade. They can adapt to the market by trimming exorbitant margins of profit in exchange for a wider and more versatile audience. The exploitation of digital music, like online commerce, will likely be at the expense of traditional modes of product distribution. Gains will eventually be had at the expense of CDs and tapes, but with a broader medium, there will likely be less need to bombard a listening audience with product messages. The message, to echo McLuhan ("the medium is the message"), will be the service. The digital medium, whether radio, video, or sound, will likely find a more distributed audience, one engaged in a series of pursuits rather than in a single activity. The Walkman served as the pilot fish in this kind of discovery. People found that they could skate, walk, ride, and run to the strains of stored music. Audio books took off with the proliferation of tape decks in automobiles, and now DVDs allow a degree of control and interactivity that destroys some of the passivity of watching a program or movie on TV. Man is a nomad, and music, an invisible signal, presses his kinetic buttons. What will it take for digital devices to become truly commonplace and portable? Believe it or not, one of the problems is "domain addresses." Digital devices, like Internet connections, occupy a location on a circuit and formats must accommodate a greater proliferation of addresses. Like telephone numbers on handsets, each device must have a unique address that connects it to the related infrastructure, and to this end the infrastructure of the digital world must be reorganized. Currently, most digital receptors use a 32 bit address. Should devices come to number more than 4 billion, there simply won't be enough combinations. Internet gurus, like Vinton Cerf, recommend an eventual reorganization of packet sending and receiving protocols to accommodate longer, 128 bit addresses. In the same way that low-end PCs (like 486/33s) fail to play Net audio and video to satisfaction, underlying protocols need to be fine-tuned to receive the coming wave of rich, distributed sound and video. If, to date, only a small percentage of people own digital audio players or buy Web music, the music industry is nevertheless consolidating its resources to make the leap from product to service. Artists like Jewel, Tom Petty, and David Bowie are a handful of celebrity experimenters who currently exemplify the eventual throng of unpackaged artists who will bring song to the Web, the walk, and, yes, even the skateboard and the run through the park. January 5, 2000