MUSIC IS NOT A PRODUCT

After more than 10 years as the front man for the punk rock band Too Much Joy, Tim Quirk realized he hadn't made a dime selling music. So his latest band, Wonderlick — a reunion with Too Much Joy bandmate Jay Blumenfield — put all its music on a Web site where fans can listen to or download it for free. Quirk asked only for donations using a PayPal system on the site. The site turned a profit in its first day and eventually funded the release of Wonderlick's debut album, which is due out in April on the San Francisco indie label Future Farmer Recordings. “In one day, I made more money giving music away and accepting donations than I ever did selling CDs,” Quirk said.

On record companies and the Internet: “The major [record] labels are great at promotion. Their whole business model is based on getting 10 million people to like the same thing. That's not what the Internet is good at; the Internet is good at having 100,000 things for 10 million people to like. It's not going to make you a lot of money necessarily. But it's not this major label, all-or-nothing, you-must-have-a-platinum-record-to-turn-a-profit thing.”

On the future of pricing: “It will be more like the cable model where you pay a price to get the service, and it's unlimited. If wireless communication gets to the point where you can be driving in your car and still access an online service like Rhapsody [Listen.com's subscription service], or you can be at the beach with some sort of boom box that connects through a satellite to the Internet, then if you're paying $10 a month for instant access to everything, who needs a CD? If you can always connect to a central library somewhere and play anything you want, you no longer need a [music] collection. At that point, it makes sense to pay a monthly fee. It might be four to six years away, but it's definitely coming.”

On the resistance: “In personal conversations with guys who run [record] labels, I experience this insistence that whatever they earn through online services like Rhapsody has to match the sale of a CD. But it's apples and oranges. Music gets sold like a product in the music business, but it's not really a product; it's much harder to quantify and define. You can't look at online music and say, ‘How can I get $15 out of everybody?’”

On PayPal donations to his band: “They ranged from $1 to $50. The really odd thing is the average donation turned out to be somewhere between $15 and $18 — the price of a CD.”

DOSSIER TIM QUIRK

Occupation: Frontman for the nascent rock band Wonderlick and managing editor/editorial director for Listen.com, a digital music subscription service

Place of residence: Oakland, Calif.

Current listening: “Rings Around the World” by Super Furry Animals

Favorite Web site: (excluding his own, www.sayhername.com, or his employers', www.listen.com) Google's image search (www.google.com/imghp?hl=en)

Next project: Recording the follow-up to Wonderlick's debut album