"Rather than being a lab experiment like a lot of other Internet plays, Andrew's connected to something real in the music culture," says Danny Goldberg, former head of Atlantic and Mercury Records and now chairman and CEO of Artemis Records and, as of last spring, a DCN board member.

That something real is live club performances. And while the audience for an initial Webcast might be modest, DCN also archives every concert for posterity -- and, Rasiej hopes, profitability. After the first year, Rasiej estimates DCN will have banked 50,000 concerts, the largest online library of digitally recorded live performances in the world. "You have to assume that 99 percent of them are worthless," Rasiej concedes -- which is to say, most of the bands that play DCN clubs will never even get a record deal, let alone lay down a hit. But the incremental cost of recording each gig is only about $100, Werth estimates. So come 2004, amidst the dreck, DCN could quite possibly own hundreds of early concert recordings of tomorrow's Pearl Jams and Sheryl Crows at a nominal cost.

Which raises the question: Will there be any money left in the music business in 2004? Napster and the more decentralized (and therefore harder to shut down) Gnutella and Freenet have the industry fretting that people will flat-out stop paying for recorded music. This would hurt DCN as much as anyone: One user could record its concerts and put them up on Napster the same night.

Such deathbed scenarios have become the favored topic at media-mogul meetings from coast to coast. After dinner on the first night of Silicon Alley Reporter editor and CEO Jason Calacanis's recent Rising Tide Summit -- a kind of junior TED conference -- Rasiej discusses the future with David Friedensohn, former CEO of SonicNet. Friedensohn now runs the video site Bigstar.com, which is changing its focus from the retail business -- since "traditional distribution of any digital product vaporizes as a business in the foreseeable future" -- towards e-mail marketing.

"Four months ago, I started looking at Napster and Gnutella, and I said, 'You know what? This business sucks,' " declares Friedensohn. "The record companies are going away."

"They'll figure something out," shoots back Rasiej, who's been busy making sure his fellow conferencegoers have the drinks they need and know the people he wants them to meet. "They'll morph."

"Andrew, you know the execs there -- that's not going to happen."

"What do labels do?" Rasiej asks rhetorically. "They promote bands, and they act as merchant banks. Napster doesn't kill the need for those. They morph." He swaggers a little, enjoying the argument.

"Nev-er hap-pen," Friedensohn insists. "Time Warner has never gotten one thing right on the Internet!"

But, Rasiej parries, now that it's AOL Time Warner, maybe it doesn't care about making money the old-fashioned way. A crowd begins to gather: Everyone in the Alley wants to know what everyone else in the Alley thinks about history's most popular piracy tool. "Look, David, if there's no way to make money on content, no one's going to make content."

"That's crap -- people will always make music."

"But imagine a two-tiered Napster system, one that pays the artists a little and one that doesn't. Which one do you use?"

With Rasiej, one enters into not so much a debate as a jovial war of attrition: As many rebuttals as someone offers, he's got one more. And when it comes to DCN's business prospects, he's full of ideas -- none more fixed than a trailer home in a tornado.

In other words, there's only one thing he hasn't yet figured out (this is the new-media business, remember): how exactly DCN will make money.

Rasiej was born in northern New Jersey to Polish Catholic immigrants, survivors of a Russian World War II prison camp. The middle child of five, he was a parochial-school star, but unlike his older brothers, he didn't get into no-tuition Regis High School, a sort of Jesuit magnet school on the Upper East Side. "Mortified" that his father had to shell out for Fordham Prep, Rasiej applied to Cooper Union for college not because he had any artistic inclinations but because it was free. Cobbling together a photography portfolio, he somehow got in and proceeded to blow off the darkroom to study architecture. After graduation, he went to work in real-estate development -- first for Harry Macklowe, then South Street, then Olympia & York. He left in 1989 to start his first nonprofit, a consultancy that gave real-estate advice to other nonprofits.

One of his first clients was the Polish Army Veterans Association, which owned an old meeting hall on Irving Place near 15th Street -- a joint that hosted rock concerts for a brief time in the eighties. When the 1990 real-estate recession scuttled the vets' redevelopment plans, they asked Rasiej to rent the hall out again. He couldn't, so he eventually found himself running the reborn Irving Plaza with no music or concert-business experience. Bringing the downtown music scene a level of professionalism (paying his bills on time, cutting smart deals with promoters Ron Delsener and Jon Scher, wrist-banding under-21's), Rasiej turned Irving into arguably the city's most important small rock venue, not to mention the club Eric Clapton and Prince chose when they wanted to play somewhere intimate. Rasiej moved in across the street at the Zeckendorf Towers, where one apartment grew over several years to encompass three. (He's also in flagrante renovatio on a recently purchased $1.7 million West Village townhouse.)

As the Web began to bubble up from the primordial media ooze, Michael Dorf approached Rasiej with an idea for what amounted to a wired version of the New Music Seminar, the new band showcase that had collapsed in 1994. When Rasiej heard that Dorf had signed Apple to a $75,000 sponsorship, he grew curious -- maybe there was some money in this Internet thing. "There I was with the idea," Dorf recalls, "but because of Andrew's tenacity and salesmanship -- he's so charismatic -- we walked out of the idea partners."

The Macintosh New York Music Festival (later renamed the Intel New York Music Festival, for the obvious reasons) became the Digital Club Festival in 1999. Though it had never amounted to much commercially before then, and the labels treated it as, at best, a curiosity, the festival served as a terrifically funded R&D lab and boot camp for people who would soon emerge as some of the most important figures in digital music: Nicholas Butterworth (today president and CEO of MTVi), David Pakman (then of Apple, now senior vice-president of MyPlay), and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser. Rasiej spent the night before the '95 festival personally chauffeuring Bell Atlantic technicians around town in order to get fifteen ISDN lines installed by showtime. When he and Dorf got an e-mail from some guy in Singapore saying "Hey, I feel like I'm club-hopping in NYC," it got them thinking. Why not have constant feeds from New York clubs running on the Web?

A budding sense that they were onto something capital-B Big started Rasiej evangelizing about the Internet and sparked what he calls his "evolution as a protagonist" in several endeavors. One was the company that would become DCN. Another was mouse. In 1997, Rasiej paid his first visit to Washington Irving High School, just across from his club. "I saw kids typing on Selectric typewriters, and I thought that was fucked up. So I ordered a T1" -- he speaks as though this were the natural reaction anyone would have had -- "and sent e-mail to ten of my friends asking them to join me to wire a computer lab in the school. Two weeks later, I had 150 people descend on this school on a Saturday." Martin Luther King High School -- which had two dial-up computers on the premises -- was next, outfitted with a T1 and 200 machines online. Today, mouse has a full-time staff of ten and more than 100,000 wired kids to its credit citywide.