To get what they call "CD Quality" over a streaming line -- a lot of people have considered that a challenge -- but aside from the fact that most systems don't deliver anything even resembling CD quality, there's a question of whether you would even want to do such a thing, given that quality is an element of the product you would be selling.

If people want to market audio over the Internet, that greater quality that sort of requires non-streaming download times is actually part of what you're selling people.

It is already possible for a certain amount of commerce to occur in terms of audio. The action is happening around broadcast standards and other streaming standards. The quality is ideally something like AM radio. You get a reasonable fax of what the sound quality is like. Most important, you get it without a bunch of glitches and dropouts. Those are the challenges at this point, I think. C O N T I N U E D . . . 2 of 3
SCHINDLER: Is there still some life in non-streaming audio on the Internet?
RUNDGREN: I think the two approaches would work in tandem. You would be able to sample someone's music using streaming. Then if you decided you really liked it, you would go to an FTP site, set your machine to start downloading, then go away. When you come back, you have the full fidelity version -- probably in a compressed format -- on your disk somewhere.

The next step is simply to either record it to a cassette tape, or in the near future, there'll be writable disk drives, either connected to your PC, or possibly to your set-top box -- however you access the Internet.

You can actually design and build your own CDs at home, simply by shopping for the music you want over the Web using streaming technologies, and then having, in non-real time, the files downloaded and written out to another device.

SCHINDLER: Tell me about Waking Dreams.
RUNDGREN: We had all these things. We built them for my purposes, but weren't exploiting them otherwise. So I figured, why not form a little corporation to develop these ideas, and give them to other people to use?

SCHINDLER: Where is the Internet going in terms of audio?
RUNDGREN: I think the Internet's greatest potential is in delivery of electronic media. Media that, while we are used to getting it now, perhaps in the form of a plastic box at the end of a long distribution chain, could just as easily be delivered as bits to people. That would eliminate a lot of the middlemen and change the economics of the relationship between the audience and the creator of the product. C O N T I N U E D . . . 3 of 3
SCHINDLER: There's a long tradition of passive entertainment. Why are you confident people want interactive entertainment?
RUNDGREN: My model has always been one in which people sometimes do and sometimes don't interact. The same way that if you sit down to watch television, and you've got your 50 channels of cable, you'll sit there clicking away until you see something you find entertaining, in which case you go into a passive mode.

As soon as that stops entertaining you, or you get the idea that there's something better somewhere else, you start clicking again. You become interactive again. So all the work I do takes into account the possibility that people may prefer to be passive. It all, more or less, runs by itself, unless you decide to do something. Then, you have a range of options, a number of pathways you can go down to change the circumstance of your experience.

How that's changed my work is that almost everything I do is now sensitive to the possibility of being found in another context -- of something that looks linear suddenly being nonlinear.

People may want to -- just for informational purposes -- examine some subset of what you're doing. So when I mix a record now, for instance, I don't mix just one mix, the so-called ideal mix. I also mix anywhere from three to six other versions of that song, some of which I may just mix the instrumentals with no vocals. The vocals with no instrumentals. A stripped-down rhythm section and vocals. Or maybe just rhythm section. Various combinations of instruments that might become useful later in contexts where people may want more choice. Maybe taking music I made and recontextualizing it with other music.

There's a lot of music nowadays that has been based on previously successful music. One of the things that started it all was M.C. Hammer doing "You Can't Touch This." All he did was take a Rick James song and write his own song over the top of it. He used Rick James' original track -- the instrumental vamp from a Rick James' record, looped it over and over, and wrote a different song on top of it.

This is going to start happening more and more. The most successful movie of all times is a movie that was made 20 years ago and was just rereleased ["Star Wars"]. You're going to discover humanity has reached a plateau in its creative output. So much of what's done is imitative of stuff that already exists. There's going to be less and less original work and more recontextualized work.

SCHINDLER: Instead of fighting that, you're going to make it easier by having those multiple mixes out there in cyberspace?
RUNDGREN: I didn't decide this is how things are going to happen. I saw two headlights in the distance. I said, "Well, what is that?" Most people will wait until they hear the truck horn before they react to it.