If you're a sophisticated user, you even may have listened to a small amount of Internet sound. It isn't as common as text or pictures because sound needs even more bits, but it adds another dimension to World Wide Web sites. Streaming does a good enough job to let you listen even while the sound is coming through a modem running at 28.8 or 33.6 kilobits per second, so you can hear programming as it happens. The most popular software for streaming is the free player from RealNetworks. But downloading audio files and streaming only work for speech and other low-quality sounds where relatively few bits are needed to represent the sound.
Good music requires a lot more bits to represent sound.
A conventional audio compact disc uses about 10 megabytes to represent each minute of music. Try to move that through a typical modem connection and you'll have some long waits. A 28.8K modem might average one K per second download speed. One way is to speed the download is a faster Internet connection. And those are coming, step by step.