When I was in high school, I loved to write incendiary satirical articles for the school paper about then-fashionable topics like war, racism, drugs and music. (Gee, not much has changed, has it?) One was so outrageous that I asked the editors to use a pseudonym in the byline.

The article, which contained not a grain of truth, caused a huge uproar. Letters were written to the local newspapers, committees were formed, resolutions were introduced. Administrators pontificated about how a lowly student could have come by such damaging knowledge. Eventually, the tempest died down, but nobody bothered to ask who the author actually was or whether the article was serious.

Which brings us to the music industry today. We know sales are down and people are downloading music without paying for it. But besides that, despite all of the hot air, falling-sky predictions and moral proclamations, no one seems to really know what's going on.

Maybe that's because no one has asked the people who are really going to decide the future of the music business: the kids. Young people in that crucial 18 to 25 demographic are forming the tastes and preferences that will rule their buying habits for the rest of their lives. I see lots of efforts being made by corporate America to influence their tastes and behaviors, but not much in the way of finding out what they really think and want. So I asked. And the answers were pretty interesting.

I talked to seven young people, four men and three women, aged 20 to 22, from all over the country. Six are in college. Some are looking to pursue a career in music; others are just enthusiastic listeners. These kids are worth listening to. Like it or not, our future depends on them.

The participants (not their real names):

Terri: from Texas, in her last year of college as a music-industry major and looking to have a career in music marketing. She plays the piano “for my own amusement.”

Chris: from Los Angeles, majoring in electrical engineering, also in his last year of school. He has seriously studied songwriting and plays in a band.

Amelia: from New York, a psychology major. She plans to go to law school.

Rob: from Pennsylvania, majoring in biomedical engineering. He's a singer and works with a semipro a cappella group.

Wayne: from Tennessee. He didn't finish high school and now works with cars. Many of his friends are going to music school, and his stepfather is a successful studio session player.

Anna: from Chicago, an environmental engineering major, also very interested in cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Eric: from Massachusetts, enrolled in a college music-industry program, plays bass in a band “for fun.”

Where do you get the music you listen to? Do you pay for it or get it free?

Rob: The music I listen to regularly is off of CDs, but when I'm at my computer or when I'm traveling, I listen to MP3s downloaded from one of the P2P services. When I'm going on a long trip, instead of waiting to rip all of my CDs to MP3, it's often just faster to download it and burn it directly onto an MP3 CD.

Amelia: I buy CDs, burn them from friends, download music and also listen to the radio. I download more than anything. I pay for maybe 30 percent of what I listen to.

Anna: I don't download anymore since Napster shut down. I buy CDs, more used than new. There is nothing I enjoy more than buying used CDs. I would much rather spend my money on a CD than clothes, and nothing makes my day like a cheap CD.

Eric: I haven't bought a CD in a long time. When Napster was getting put down, and Metallica and the others were making so much noise, I thought a lot of the bands were crybabies, so I stopped listening to mainstream stuff. I know the people in a lot of the local bands, and they just give their CDs away for promotion, to get their sound out. I don't really use KaZaA much anymore. I used to, every once in a while, but I go through newsgroups now. You get the whole CD; you don't just pick and choose one song, which might not even be what you want.

Wayne: I don't buy new music — mostly. I used to work at Tower, so I try to go to Tower, but like everybody else says, it's too damn expensive.

Terri: I don't buy many CDs. The last time was a few months ago for a gift. My little sister still buys them. She's 13; for her, they're still cool. I listen to the radio when I know a station that's good, but radio gets old and bland. I just listen on my computer, getting music from KaZaA.

What would you consider to be a fair price for a CD?

Chris: Under nine dollars.

Anna: For used CDs, about $7.99 or $8.99. New ones I try not to buy for over $14.

Rob: Sub-10 dollars, unless it's a new release and I'm really into the band, then I'll pay $16 or $17. There have been times when I was going to the store to get one $17 disc and I ended up not buying it, but spending $20 on two other discs.

Wayne: You pay $20 and there would be two good songs on it. You get home and you're pissed off that you bought it. I go to used stores, but mostly for vinyl. It sounds better to me than CDs.

Terri: For the price of a CD, I can eat for a week. I'd pay nine or $10. You can find those, but it's usually in used CD stores, or else they're really old and I don't want to listen to them.

Eric: I honestly don't feel that going out and buying a CD is worth it now. Any other company that would still have the same product for 20 years wouldn't be in business without upgrading their product a substantial amount. It's the labels saying, “We own 80 percent of the market, and we can do anything we want. This is the product, you buy it.” And it came to a point where, don't we have a say in it anymore?

Are you happy with the sound quality of the music you download?

Wayne: I don't really hear the difference between the MP3s I download and a CD I bought in a store. On the vinyl, the ranges are bigger: Instead of a flat sound, it's more spread out, more of a live feel. It does sound better.

Rob: I've downloaded enough now to hear the difference. I used to think that MP3s sounded good, and I still do, but when I started getting MP3s and then the CDs, I'd hear all of this other stuff. The more I listen to MP3s, the more I notice little compression artifacts like poor stereo separation or a smearing of higher-frequency content, like hi-hats. So, I'll typically go out and buy the album, turn off the PC and listen to the disc with headphones. Especially if you've got a really carefully made album with really good engineering.

Amelia: Sometimes you get bad ones. We'll download it and say to each other, “Wait a minute, does that sound right to you?” You can tell. Sometimes, there's a difference between the better MP3s and the CDs, but not really. I'll download a song, and then I'll listen to a friend's CD, and it's, “Well, same thing to me.”

Chris: I sometimes forget it's compressed, and I'll listen to a song, and I'll think this band is great, but the sonic quality isn't very good. And then I'll think, “Oh, right, it's MP3.”

Eric: I don't think there's much of a difference. A lot of programs out there can convert MP3s into .WAV files, and that creates a clearer sound. It's just a notch below the quality of a CD.

Are there advantages to having a CD vs. downloading an album?

Amelia: The booklet. I read a lot about artists, and the booklet has pictures and credits and thank yous. And since everyone's using samples, with every song they tell you who they sampled from, so you can go and listen to the original. And also lyrics: if you want to know the words of the song. I have all of my discs together in a little zipper container, and I arrange it so I have the covers outside and the CDs inside.

Rob: I have a couple of friends who have record collections, and it's really satisfying for them to go over to the shelf and take out a record and put it on the turntable and put the needle on. For me, the same thing goes for CDs. And you're not just hearing one song by the artists, but you're hearing the entire picture of what the artist has to present.

What happens when you leave school and you don't have a free broadband connection anymore?

Chris: I become much more frugal in what I listen to. I spend a lot more time listening to the CDs that I already have.

Terri: I can't imagine not spending the money for a somewhat speedy Internet [connection]. That would drive me insane. You want to use it for Internet anyway, so the music is a bonus.

Rob: If I didn't have that connection, I would probably not have had nearly as diverse music tastes. Over the past few years, I've switched back and forth between a high-speed connection and a modem, and my musical interests have expanded at a more rapid rate when I have had access to a broadband connection. I have AOL DSL at home.

How do you hear about new artists?

Amelia: Usually, I get recommendations from my friends whose taste I like or I see a new artist on television. When artists first come out, you'll hear them on the radio or see them on TV, or there's an article in the paper.

Rob: I'll read articles about the bands that I like, and if I read in an article of another band that's one of their influences or is like them, I'll go and check them out.

Chris: I like to look at amazon.com lists: a customer bought this one, he also bought these. Go to that, listen to the samples, “Hey, that's not bad.” Read some of the editorial reviews: This CD was at the top of the indie rock charts in 1994, and they were a really influential band and this should be in your collection. Okay, so I go out and I get that. From e-mail lists, I get announcements about different shows, or people open up for other people, you get into them there. When I'm looking for a song on the P2P networks, maybe I'll find a guy who has six songs by the band I want.

Could the record labels be doing more to get you to listen to new artists?

Eric: On a DVD, you have coming attractions for stuff that's the same genre. You could do that on a CD or on the Web. The labels should figure out a way to get together with KaZaA, so that when you type in a band you like, a popup comes up for a different band.

Terri: How are you going to reach people? What are people really doing? Maybe commercials on TV. Kids are sitting and watching TV. Or doing popups: different things that will let you listen to something for 10 seconds and see if you like it. Or they could buy a word in a search engine, and when someone looks for it, it shows all of the new people in that genre and what they're doing, and you can listen to a little snippet of it. Isn't that how you grow a fan base? By familiarizing a person with a band.

Wayne: The music hasn't been so bad — it's good. But I don't know where they get these singers — they're whining and pissing and moaning about nothing. They sound like they're getting their ass kicked while they're trying to sing. I won't buy that. That's why everybody I know hasn't bought any new CDs in a long time. It's, for lack of a better word, propaganda. You flood everybody with something more and more, and after a while, they think they like it.

Can radio help?

Terri: People are in their cars and traveling, and they want to listen to music, so it's never going to go away, but as a way of pushing new artists, it's on the way out.

Eric: I don't think XM and satellite radio are going to do that much, because people aren't willing to pay for a CD right now, never mind a fee every month for a radio station. They do offer a lot, but how do you get 10 to 15 dollars a month out of someone's pocket when they can listen for free? I don't think Clear Channel is doing a very good job. You don't hear a lot of new music promotion on it.

Wayne: I turn on the radio and immediately turn it off. I'll go to the oldies station or the classic rock station in hopes that they'll play Zeppelin. Radio's dead.

What would get you to spend more money on recorded music?

Rob: More albums by bands that I like. And if there were extra content, I would pay for it. One thing that comes to mind, which I personally would find interesting, would be if they could give you more than two audio tracks so you could mix it yourself. If it were a band I liked, I would have no trouble spending $50 on a disc that had a lot of tracks I could do that with. I would play with that to no end. And they should do a “making of the CD” like they do on DVDs.

Eric: I would suggest three different things. One is [guitar] tab music. You see all of the commercials for “music makes you smarter”? That's a booming industry right now, and to go along with that, you put tab music in there. So you can buy a band's CD and you can learn their songs right off the bat. I think a lot of people go through stages where they want to pick up a guitar and learn how to play, and they never really end up playing but try to learn a couple of songs. Two, I think PC-enabled CDs, with interviews with the band, are a great idea. They should put that on every disc, instead of one in 100. This is why they took a year to do it in the studio, and this is how they wrote the song, and this is how it came about. People would start buying stuff like that for 15 or 16 bucks. And then, like on DVDs, there's coming attractions on the disc itself. You put the freeware for playing the stuff on the Website, so consumers have to go there.

Wayne: If it's quality music, I'll support the band. If I like it, I'm more inclined to buy it: to show support. If something is out just because it's trendy, I'm not going to spend money on it; I'm just going to download it.

Amelia: I can't think of any reason to spend more money on music. If there were better artists, more artists that I liked, I would buy their CDs. I would download it first, of course, but then I'd go out and buy it. But there are so few that I like.

Chris: CDs under nine bucks. Avril Lavigne did a CD for 7 to 8 dollars, and they sold 4 million of them.

Are the record companies still necessary?

Eric: They are to the extent that they are able to market a name nationally or worldwide. But that's pretty much all they're good for.

Terri: I think they should cut back on all of the people they're paying. It seems like they pay a lot of people to do…what exactly? (Laughs) They need the musicians, but why do you need legislative executives?

Rob: Some parts of the industry are just not going to be around much longer. My dad told me that there was a place near where he grew up that made stagecoaches. Even in the age of cars, that's all they made. And they were around even up until my dad's lifetime. They were this completely stubborn company, and, of course, they went out of business.

Terri: It might be a little scary for them, but I think if one of the major five labels were to just step out from that whole circle of monopoly and say, “You know what, we're a good company, we're going to treat our artists right and this is what our name stands for,” I think more people are going to honor and respect that. And, in turn, they'll get more artists and consumers that way.

Eric: I think that the RIAA is going about it in totally the wrong way. They're trying to represent themselves as promoting new ideas, when, really, they have none. The scariest part for them is that they can't point a finger at anyone. They can't say, “The guy on the street corner, this business exec, he's downloading the most.” It's everybody. The numbers for downloading are showing that what they're doing is not working. If they got their hands on it when it first came out, they could have done anything. There would have been infinite possibilities. But they let it grow too big for them to hop on it now. The thing that really shows me how badly they're doing, how desperate they are, is this new “kidpop”: reissuing their old catalog and aiming it toward kids so that the baby-boomer parents will buy it all over again.

Should the record labels set up their own downloading networks?

Anna: I personally don't like having to have my computer on all of the time if I want to listen to music. If a record company's really looking to make money for an artist, I don't think selling MP3 singles on the Web is going to do it. I think their main objective should be to gain loyal fans — fans of the artist, not the single track. That's why I prefer CDs, because you see more of the depth of the artist when you listen to more of the songs. If they're looking to have a solid fan base, the way to do it is to sell the artist, not the single.

Terri: They could offer something more than just the music from the site. Like a drawing: win Dave Matthews tickets, or go backstage, or meet the press — something that's going to attract people who say, “Wow, I might be able to do this extra thing and get involved.”

Rob: I wouldn't pay to download an MP3. I think that what they should do to make people buy CDs should be what they did with VHS. Originally, VHS players were just for people to tape off their TV. But then the studios went out and saturated the market and made VHS tapes of everything they had: movies and all kinds of stuff. If the record companies would just saturate the MP3 market with free or very easily duplicatable copies of the songs at, like, 96 kilobits or some really low quality, I think that people would download it and notice the difference in quality. People who are really interested in an artist and hear a really bad-quality MP3 floating around would go out and buy the CD.

A longer version of these interviews can be found at Paul Lehrman's personal site, InsiderAudio.com.