Not so controllable is the risk of companies using the Net to troll for unfavorable mentions of rivals—grist for negative advertising. There is only one solution: make better products or give better service. * * * * * Of the goods and services discussed here, a major kind is conspicuously missing so far: entertainment. Some of the best is free. Just ahead you’ll find a favorite of many Netfolks—the Internet Underground Music Archive, from which you can download free samples from top hits as well as surprises from new musicians. CHAPTER THREE EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock, Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, Bianca’s Smut Shack, and David Letterman in Cyberspace Don’t count on the Ugly Mugs pushing Billy Joel off the charts, or even showing up at your closest record store. They’re zany, avant-garde musicians whose work is a cross between Frank Zappa and freakish, carnival rock—not the stuff of the Top 40. But Jeff Patterson, a thin, pale guitarist with a fondness for old jeans and green-topped sneakers, can still spread the word about himself and the other Mugs. Their music is on the Internet. Fans as far off as Turkey and Japan can dial the Internet Underground Music Archive run by Patterson and his “co-czar,” Rob Lord. Hundreds of musicians are suddenly in cyberspace. For just $100 a year they can pay IUMA to post cuts from their music, complete with information on how you can send away for the CDs and tapes. In fact, some have even posted complete songs to the Net for free. Tens of thousands of Netfolk a week dial up IUMA, making 200,000 page-accesses—perhaps a third of the attention that _Playboy_ gets, but still one of the best numbers on the Web. That’s no small feat: The archive more or less started in a tiny room with a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and it is still a low-budget operation run by two information science majors. IUMA is just one of many delights on the Net for techies and technophobes alike. Entertainment and culture are taking off in a major way in cyberspace just when clueless Snubbites are deriding the Net as artless. I can enjoy gifted but unheralded performers, from reggae artists to banjo players. The New Zealand Symphony is online with a digitized rendition of the national anthem down there. Imagine the possibilities for fans of classical music in the future—the chances to hear live performances of Tchaikovsky directly from Moscow, or enjoy classical Chinese music from Peking or Taipei. Net.radio is already here. WYXC, for example, a station at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sends rock music into the ether twenty-four hours a day.