Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music. John Alderman

us and any other species on the planet.”

      He believed exploiting that difference was his destiny, an obsession begun at an early age. Uniting the computer and media was his interest since at least high school. “At a core level,” Glaser said, “I’ve always been a media junkie interested in the nexus between media communications infrastructure and interactive digital technology—the things that I’m working on now and with RealNetworks.” These interests and his entrepreneurial spirit coincided to give him the inspiration to create, and doggedly work to dominate, the field. In an environment filled with college-age youths willing to lose themselves completely to their work, Glaser was able to compete because he seems to have been born with a superhuman ability to juggle an astounding number of projects. He described an “intense focus” that one sometimes sees in college kids “when they first discover that they’re able to do things and have that kind of expressive impact—that you can stay up all night and write software that does something that’s never been done before.” Like a few other Energizer Bunny-like Microsoft alumni, Glaser has pushed himself far.

      Glaser embodied some interesting contradictions, which would inevitably carry over into the company he founded. The son of a psychiatric social worker and a printer from Yonkers, New York, Glaser was tirelessly devoted to social activism from his teens, during which time he leafleted for farm workers and organized against nuclear power. At Yale, while simultaneously working for three degrees (one in computer science and two in economics), he somehow found the energy to write a column and edit the editorial page of the Yale Daily News, lead the Campaign Against Militarism and the Draft, and run a small videogame company called Ivy Research. By the time he graduated in 1983, Glaser was a textbook workaholic, an attribute that primed him for success at Microsoft, as well as for running the Real-Networks juggernaut.

      A childhood incident seems to have set the spark that propelled him down this path. While in third grade, the young Glaser went with his New York classmates on a field trip to nearby Inwood Park, just outside the city, to visit the Native American caves where, into the ’50s, one could find arrowheads.

      “In addition to [the artifacts] there was a massive amount of garbage and pollution,” remembered Glaser. His class was disturbed by the conditions, and his teacher encouraged them to write the parks commissioner, bundling and sending the finished complaints. The commissioner soon sent his response, a letter that quoted some of Glaser’s text. The 8-year-old was very impressed by the power of interactive communication.

      In high school, this fascination would continue, and while he studied early computer science, Glaser and his classmates hooked up a terrestrial wired radio station, broadcasting by stringing wires within his high school, running from a room halfway between the gym and the cafeteria. “You could argue that I’m pursuing the same interests that go back twenty years, or thirty years to third grade, only on a larger scale.”

      After his incredibly busy performance at school, Microsoft was the only company fast enough for Glaser. He joined the company because he was impressed with the team there, and soon he rocketed to head several key projects, picking up on some of the main technologies that would drive the Net. “I was certainly very lucky from a timing standpoint,” he said, noting that he was involved with all the networking products for Microsoft in the late eighties and learned protocols such as TCP/IP (the technical underpinnings of the Internet). He was also in charge of multimedia consumer systems, which helped him understand a fair amount about hypermedia and interactive experience from the standpoint of the stand-alone PC.

      After Glaser’s departure from Microsoft, a good friend named Mitch Kapor, inventor of Lotus 1–2–3, convinced him to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which Kapor had cofounded with John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist. At the EFF meetings Glaser hooked up with Dave Farber, who would become the chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission. Glaser said about Farber: “if you use the plural, ‘fathers’ of the Internet, he’d certainly be in the Philadelphia Convention Hall picture.”

      Although Glaser also met people involved with developing interactive TV, he was not intrigued by that technology; he concluded that it “had no method, from either a technical or from a business standpoint, of bootstrapping itself.” It would not be able to take off—because it had no way of reaching the critical mass of viewer and broadcasters interested in making it succeed. But the Net, on the other hand, excited him with its potential. He believed it offered “an architectural solution for all the fundamental issues.” Namely, the distribution network was already developed enough to sustain momentum. “It was clear to me that through the whole phenomenon later called viral marketing this was going to unleash incredible impact,” Glaser said. “It was one of these snowballs moving downhill with incredible alacrity, so it seemed to me that if we could do the same thing for audio and video that Mosaic was doing for static text and images, that we would have a profound impact.”

      The Web would not spring to life without baby steps, so audio—low fidelity audio—was Glaser’s way of making the first move. With friends who had been involved in politics, he launched Progressive Networks, a company that would deliver highly compressed sound files in small streams so that even with slow modems, anyone could listen in real time. The idea was to start playing the files while they were still being downloaded, to eliminate the usual frustrating wait before anything could be heard. The system was dubbed “RealAudio,” using the space-less conjunction favored by Net companies. To make it work for the slow modems of the time meant heavily compressing the audio file, stripping away a vast amount of information and leaving only the bare bones of sound. What you ended with usually resembled a scratchy low-fi AM radio. Even with its faults, the fact that RealAudio worked was an exciting beginning, and it was actually a very apt solution for talk-based radio and news shows. While some hard-core geeks conceivably would spend a night downloading a song by their favorite groups, few would do the same for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” But once the barrier of a huge download was eliminated, many listeners flocked to the Web to hear to their favorite shows at their convenience and search the archives of countless broadcasts.

      RealAudio’s main target was radio stations that wanted to make their broadcasts, usually talk, available. Glaser could see the difficulties of persuading the record labels to release their prized catalogs of songs and didn’t want to pursue music downloads just yet. Comparing streaming audio files for broadcast to downloading them for physical delivery, Glaser decided for two reasons to avoid the latter. The first reason was that low-power modems made downloading too onerous for the general public. The second, more persistent issue was that the owners of copyrights were unlikely to embrace the Net, “not for reasons of rational economic self-interest, but because the music industry operated in a hidebound, one might even say cartel-like, way.”

      Glaser described the attitude of the major record companies as “‘we have these physical pressing plants, why would we put anyone else in the distribution business?’” He could see that they didn’t want to let anyone else in “even though those new people might have grown their business. So, our philosophy was: let’s deliver the best possible consumer experience and focus on something that doesn’t have gatekeepers that can unilaterally determine whether or not we can get something going.” The reluctance of rights holders did not subside over time. Quite the contrary, he said, “now it’s the battle royale.”

      The radio strategy worked, and soon there were stations all over the world distributing programming on the Web, from hour-long specials to around-the-clock broadcasting. Web sites like CNET and HotWired were trying to use the Net to score points over old media by supplementing their written offerings with RealAudio interviews and reporting. Despite only-adequate sound, online offerings expanded beyond talk to music radio, and RealAudio also became the default format for previewing songs on sites such as Amazon.com. It wasn’t just in America, either. Envelope-pushing radio stations around the world began to broadcast their content over the Net. Expatriates from countries as far apart as Finland and Thailand were able to tune in to the music of their homelands, just as scattered American college alumni could stay tuned to their universities’ stations.

      Several generations later, RealAudio started to sound very good, especially over faster lines. Fidelity at slower settings was better, too. With its primacy established