If you think that the $10-billion-a-year recording industry is a little nervous, you’re right. In early 1994 Lord told the _San Jose Mercury News_: “We want to kill the record companies.” He and Patterson have backed off since then; they’ve even helped Warner and other giants set up Net areas of their own. IUMA’s own 500-act selection is pathetic compared to those at the largest record stores. Still, think about the long run: The IUMA model just might jeopardize the seven-digit salaries of top recording executives. After all, if the Net can advertise music and even be used to take orders—perhaps with electronic forms—just what becomes of the big studios? They themselves will sell music directly over the Net, but with heavy competition. The bypass-the-middle-man idea could apply in other ways. What about radio hosts, for example? Suppose they can reach people all over the world through the Internet, and perhaps ultimately through wireless connections based on the Net. Will they need CBS or NBC or ABC or equivalents as much as they do now? I can already download snippets from, say, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Too, just what will be the fate of art dealers if so much of art goes digital and people can discover artists on their own without leaving their living rooms? Publishers of newspapers, magazines, and books, of course, are in a quandary—see the next chapter on electronic publishing. In some ways I don’t envy the big guys. IUMA is clearly wired into the Internet, while companies such as CBS, at least at this point, are fumbling in some respects. Many of the amateurs on the Net are actually coming up with better offerings than are the professionals. When I dropped by, the official Letterman page on the WWW was far from an abomination, and yet at the same time it showed the problems here. The page indeed was full of odds and ends about how to get _Late Show_ tickets, Letterman’s upcoming guests, his top-ten lists (the one for the April 13th broadcast was on “Ways CBS Can Raise Money,” with number one being “A two-hour paycheck freeze on Letterman”), and the rest. But where were the connections with the rest of the Net, especially the many Letterman fans out there? How about the fans’ Letterman pages? Or relevant mailing lists or newsgroups? Perhaps they were there but hidden, but whatever the case the cyberspace Letterman was less hip than the one on The Box. To Letterman’s credit, he didn’t fake things. He publicly confessed he was ignorant of data ways. But in my opinion, his Web people could have done better.